


Misfire (Reload)

by FletcherHonorama



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Miranda Lives AU, Multi, POV Miranda Barlow, Unfortunate Side-Effect: Peter Ashe Also Lives, somewhat less than canon-typical violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:47:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 55,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28144842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FletcherHonorama/pseuds/FletcherHonorama
Summary: The gun doesn’t go off.
Relationships: Abigail Ashe & Miranda Barlow, Captain Flint | James McGraw/Thomas Hamilton, Miranda Barlow & Captain Flint | James McGraw & Thomas Hamilton, Miranda Barlow & Thomas Hamilton, Miranda Barlow/Captain Flint | James McGraw
Comments: 56
Kudos: 102





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [YourOzness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/YourOzness/gifts).



> I know I said this was coming out next year, but I’ve successfully moved house and I had a surprise free day today and got the first chapter ready to go so I thought if it's ready, why wait? There’s no formal update schedule this time but I don’t anticipate any huge delays – the other chapters are very nearly ready and I’ll be working on them whenever I get the chance, so they’ll definitely start coming out in January if not a bit earlier.
> 
> This one's for YourOzness, without whom it would absolutely not exist, who asked me to write it and brainstormed it with me and then went ahead and beta read it as well. Thank you <3

Miranda heard the click, but it was not until James was halfway around the table, walking at first and then breaking into a run, that the words that had been spilling furiously from her lips faltered and dried up. It was not until she turned and saw Colonel Rhett throwing his pistol to the ground with his left hand and drawing his sword out of its sheath with his right, stepping forward with a sick gleam in his eyes, that she realised what that click had signified. 

“No,” Peter said, stepping forward with a hand out to intercept James. James did not slow in the least, did not so much as spare him a glance as he rushed by. 

And he had no weapon.

Miranda stepped in front of him thoughtlessly, her rage frozen in her, cold and breathless, replaced by sick fear and shock at the thing that had almost befallen her. It must not befall James. _It_ _must not befall James_. She took his arm and pulled him off his path, her nails digging into the leather sleeves of his great coat, so that the two of them stopped together at the corner of the table. He neither resisted nor acknowledged her; every inch of his body was rage, and he strained under her grip. “James,” she said, taking his other arm and standing on the tips of her toes so he had no choice but to look at her. “Stop. _Stop._ ”

He did look at her then; she was not sure if he saw her.

“Colonel, put that away,” Peter snapped. The sound of his voice woke the rage in Miranda and she nearly screamed at him again that he would dare speak, that he would dare _breathe_ after all that he had done to them. She turned to look at him, still holding on tightly to James’s arm. Peter had not come any closer but stepped back toward the double doors, one arm still held out in front of him as though that would do the slightest fucking thing to prevent the looming disaster.

Where Miranda had looked to Peter, James had his eyes fixed on Colonel Rhett, who stood with his sword still bared, looking between Peter and James and not seeming at all inclined to do as Peter had instructed him. After a long moment where all Miranda could hear was the ticking of the grandfather clock, James looked back to Miranda, and there was nothing at all in his eyes. He was perfectly empty; he had gone away. 

She stepped back from him, dismayed, and he took one carefully-measured step backward to match her. Peter let out a breath, shaking and relieved, and lowered his arm. Miranda would have pitied him for his stupidity if she had any emotion left inside her but a roiling mass of anger and fear.

“My lord,” said Colonel Rhett. “That woman –”

James lunged for Peter’s empty chair and swung it around his body with a roar as he closed with the colonel, knocking the sword out of his hand and forcing him back with brute force, the chair caught between them. James pushed forward, and the colonel stumbled backward until his back slammed into a pillar. He gasped in sudden, breathless pain and tried to push the chair off his chest, but James had the advantage and pressed in all the harder.

The sword had not fallen so very far away from them; it had landed by the wall near Miranda, and if she could bring enough life into her legs to move them, she would be able to go over and pick it up.

Before she could muster that strength men came in through both doors, one running into the open doorway behind James and Colonel Rhett and two throwing open the doors behind Peter, all three with guns at the ready.

“Out! Out!” Peter roared, pushing the two nearest him bodily out of the room and slamming the doors closed after them. He waved a frantic arm at the third man, who stood frozen in the doorway with his gun half-raised. “Collins, out! _Out!_ ”

When the door closed behind Collins, James manoeuvred the chair from Colonel Rhett’s chest up toward his neck, his entire body straining with the effort of it, his boots slipping a little on the smooth wooden floor as he pushed relentlessly forward.

No doubt the doors would open again, and soon. Miranda could not trust Peter to hold off his men any more than she could trust him with her husband’s life. He had taken them by surprise in expelling them so decisively the first time; if they came in again and Colonel Rhett was still in danger, they would likely take a great deal more convincing not to intervene.

This had to stop. It had to. Miranda did not know what to do; she knew only that something had to be done. She started toward James, but Peter had begun to move fractionally earlier, and by the time Miranda had taken two steps forward he had come all the way from the door to stand in between her and James, holding one arm up to repel Miranda and the other to – Miranda did not know what he was trying to achieve by holding his hand up to James, who saw only the man he strove to crush against the pillar, who had pointed his gun at Miranda and tried to kill her. 

Peter shouted for James to stop. James did not stop. 

Miranda stepped aside to collect the colonel’s sword where it had fallen. The pistol he had dropped was not far from his left boot, which was presently scrabbling for firm footing as he tried in vain to push James away from him. Peter went on shouting, maintaining a careful distance between himself and James. “This is not how – James, please – James, I am – _Lieutenant!_ ”

James shoved the chair into Colonel Rhett as hard as he could then turned, made up that careful distance in an instant and landed the sweetest punch Miranda had ever seen, flush on Peter’s cheek. It sent him stumbling backward a few steps, his left hand splayed across his face; if he had not crashed into the table and braced himself there, he would certainly have fallen.

Colonel Rhett did not waste any time. He tossed the chair aside and started toward Miranda, bent over and gasping for breath but no less determined for it. She raised the sword to point at him, and in that moment she did not want him to stop but to keep coming on, all the way on – but James threw himself into the colonel’s path and the two of them tumbled to the floor at Miranda’s feet. James was on top of the colonel, struggling to maintain his position as they tussled; if he was thrown off, if they turned themselves around, Miranda would be ready. She gripped the sword deathly tight. Blood filled her mouth where she had bitten down on her tongue.

“Give that to me,” Peter said, holding his hand out to Miranda as he approached her, the other still pressed firmly against his cheek. Blood pooled in between his fingers and trickled out over the back of his hand.

The only way Miranda would give this sword to Peter would be point-first. She held fast and shook her head. He opened his mouth to insist, but horror flashed in his eyes as he heard the door behind him open again, and he was across the room and away from her in a flash. 

“Keep this fucking door _closed_!” he bellowed, shoving another man out and slamming the door with both hands. He stood there for a single heartbeat, then turned and hurried back to Miranda, his arm outstretched. “Give it to me now.”

“I am giving you nothing,” Miranda said, tasting her own blood in her mouth as she watched Peter’s flow freely down his face and into his beard.

“No one is going to die today,” Peter urged her. “Give me the sword, and I will put an end to this.”

“How will you?”

“Miranda,” he said. “Now!”

“You cannot speak reason to your own man without a sword in hand?” Miranda said, her voice rising to match his. “He is under your command, Peter. Command him!”

But when Miranda looked to the two men struggling on the floor, she saw the flaw in her argument. James had Colonel Rhett pinned on the ground with a forearm across his throat, using the weight of his body to smother the bucks and the attempted knees the colonel directed his way. 

If James killed him …

Peter made no further attempt to persuade Miranda. He fell to his knees by James and the colonel’s feet – at enough distance that he would not be kicked, of course – and leaned forward, bracing himself with the fingertips of one hand on the floor. “James,” he said urgently. “James, do not end things this way. One catastrophe has been averted, but there is nothing I can do for you if you persist in –”

“He tried to kill her,” James growled with the little breath he had, using his free hand to bat Colonel Rhett’s hands off the front of his coat. He spared Peter a single glance, murder in his eyes. 

Peter reared back a little, lifting his fingers from the floor and raising his hand up in that placatory gesture that did nothing but increase Miranda’s ire. “He did not kill her, James!” he said. “Nobody is dead. Nobody will die here. Please, please stop. This is not what I wanted.”

Miranda had no experience wielding a sword, but it would not be difficult, with Peter kneeling as he was, pleading with James, to approach him quietly and catch him off guard. She had no doubt that Colonel Rhett would keep the blade very well honed, and once she had used it on Peter, there would be nothing stopping –

“James, there is something I must tell you!” Peter said, panicked now, leaning forward again, this time on both hands, as Colonel Rhett’s struggles began to weaken. “James, stop! Stop! It is about Thomas!”

Miranda nearly did it then. She nearly took a step and swung the sword at his neck, his hateful face, that mouth that dared to speak the name of the man he had killed. But James faltered, all his attention caught by what Peter had said, and Colonel Rhett hit him once in the throat and threw him off towards Miranda and Peter, rolling away in the other direction and gasping desperately for air. James was back on his feet in an instant, but Miranda could reach him, just, with her left hand, and she found his fingers with hers. He startled like a rabbit, his hand jerking away from hers as the colonel tried to push himself up off the floor, but instead of surging forward, he stayed where he was.

The colonel’s arms gave way, leaving him resting on his elbows with his brow on the floor as he drew great gulps of air back into his lungs. James did not take his eyes off him for a second, but he stretched his hand out again by his side. Miranda took it and held it with all her strength.

Peter went to stand over Colonel Rhett, offering him a hand and hauling him to his feet. 

“Leave this room, Colonel,” Peter said as soon as the colonel was standing unassisted. “Now.”

Colonel Rhett glared at his sword in Miranda’s hand and James in the other, who stood not five steps away and was more than ready to close the space between them and finish the thing he had started. The cold hatred in the colonel’s eyes sent shivers running through Miranda’s body; she matched it easily when his eyes came to rest on hers.

“Do not return for any reason other than my direct summons,” Peter said. “Do not speak of what has happened in this room until you speak of it to me. Do you understand me?”

It took a long, long moment for Colonel Rhett to work himself up to his answer. “I understand, my lord,” he said, the words hoarse and weak and his mouth curled with resentment.

Peter nodded to the door. “Go.”

He looked again at Miranda and his sword then looked quickly over the floor. When he saw the pistol lying where he had thrown it at the base of the pillar, an unpleasant light came into his eyes.

“Leave that,” Peter said. “Go.” He stepped forward and opened the door, and after one lingering moment of defiance the colonel walked through it, his gait stiff with pain as well as resentment.

When the door closed again, James finally turned his head to look at Miranda. The bloodlust had all but faded from him, and all that was left – Miranda remembered only too vividly what Peter had said, and she knew exactly where James’s mind had gone. Her fingers tightened painfully around the hilt of Colonel Rhett’s sword.

She let go of James and stepped between him and Peter, the tip of the sword pointing roughly at Peter’s knees as he turned back around from the door. “How dare you use him in this?” she said, her voice leaping from her wildly where she forced her body to hold so very still. “How dare you speak his name?”

“Miranda,” Peter said. “Please listen to me.”

“Why? What could you possibly have to say?”

“I wish to –”

“Answer my question, Peter.”

“Your –”

“How _dare_ you?” Miranda’s voice shook; her arm shook. Tremors ran through every part of her, but she would have her answer.

James moved from behind Miranda to stand beside her, his left arm brushing against her right, which held the sword. “What is it about Thomas?” he said, his voice dangerously quiet. “What must you tell me?” 

Miranda stepped across in front of him again. 

Peter touched his cheek and winced. He looked at the blood smeared on his hand and then at Miranda. “When Alfred Hamilton came to me –”

“No,” Miranda said.

He stood with his mouth open, blinking in confusion. “No?”

“If you have something to say, say it plainly. I have heard more than enough equivocation from you.”

“Thomas is alive,” he said.

For a moment Miranda could not see. She could not hear. She could not feel her hand on the sword or her feet on the floor. She did not know where she was. “You lying –”

“He is alive.”

James’s hand closed around Miranda’s upper arm. He was so close to her she could feel his breath on her neck. 

“When Alfred Hamilton came to me –”

James’s grip tightened; the pain of it brought Miranda’s mind into proper focus.

“You are despicable,” she said, the words scorching her throat as she said them. “You are the very lowest of –”

“Thomas was sent to Bethlem and then away again,” Peter said, his voice rising to speak over her. “He was only there for –”

“I will kill you,” Miranda promised. “I will slit you open from chin to navel, and it will be a better death than you deserve.”

“Miranda,” James whispered into her ear.

“What?” she said, turning to look at him. He was stricken, confused, bloody around the nose and mouth. There were tears in his eyes, and Peter had put them there.

“Lower the sword, please,” he implored her. “Do not tempt fate. Do not tempt Rhett. Lower the sword and do not speak such things aloud. I would not see you die here today.” 

Miranda lowered the sword a little, and then considerably more as it grew impossibly heavy in her hand. James moved his grip from her arm to her waist, cautious and light. 

“Thank you,” he whispered. 

“He is lying,” she said to him, her voice loud and clear. “You know he is lying.”

“He is likely lying,” he said through a mouth twisted in grief and distress. “But I would not see you die here today. So I ask you.”

 _You are the one who struck him and made him bleed_ , Miranda thought, the words vicious inside her. _You are the one who attacked his man. When is it my turn?_

“No one will die here today,” Peter declared. “We will see our way through this.”

“Don’t you fucking talk like there’s a ‘we’,” said James, menace in every syllable as he turned back to Peter. “It is your own doing that there is not.”

“I was going to tell you once we had things settled here. I was going to make it right.”

“And I should believe a single word out of your mouth why, exactly?”

Peter nodded. “I understand your scepticism. I can offer you no proof of anything in this moment. That is why I intended to wait. That is why –”

“Peter,” Miranda said, “if you are not going to speak plainly about –”

“I can have him here in two weeks.”

James’s breath gusted against the back of Miranda’s neck, and she closed her eyes. All the anger in the world would get her nowhere now. Miranda could be possessed of Achilles’s own rage, his brutality and his divine favour, and it would make no difference because Thomas would always be James’s weak point, and James was Miranda’s. Peter had played this card with James on the brink of murder and got what he wanted from it; he would be able to play it again and again and again until he had found a way out of this for himself.

But Miranda still had the sword, and she would not be letting go of it any time soon.

“Please sit down,” Peter said, indicating their long-abandoned dinner. 

What might have been Miranda’s last meal on earth still sat waiting for her; the candles in the middle of the table burned steadily and evenly, uncaring of everything that had transpired. Not so much time had passed, but Miranda could not for the life of her remember a time before Colonel Rhett had pulled the trigger of his pistol and been thwarted by it. This food was all the food there ever had been in the world; James had never been anything but this man standing helplessly by her side, dreaming of the love he had lost; Peter had always been the very foulest of villains, standing before her just as he was now. Miranda had always had this sharp, sharp sword in her hand, along with the burning desire to use it.

“Miranda,” James whispered in her ear. 

“No,” she said to Peter.

“I would not see you die here today,” James said again. He was as near to begging as Miranda had ever heard him; something inside her gave way when his voice wavered, and the sharpness of the moment faded. 

“If anyone else is to come through either of those doors, I would prefer they see nothing that might provoke them to rash action,” Peter said, his voice low and urgent. “There is no fight to be had here any more. Please sit down, and we can discuss –”

“Your men are a disgrace,” Miranda informed him. “They beat James in the street, knowing he was not the one who sent you that letter. They beat him in front of your daughter, who we have rescued from the most unspeakable fate and delivered to you safe and sound. Your daughter, Peter. As if she had not seen horrors enough in the last few months of her life, she now sees James, the man who took her away from it all, set upon by her father’s men without warning and without excuse. Were it not for her defence of him, do you know how far they would have gone?”

“Miranda –”

“Colonel Rhett pulled the trigger of his pistol intending to shoot me dead.”

“I know.”

“You know. You _know_ this, and –”

“Let’s sit,” James breathed in Miranda’s ear. “I cannot trust that –”

“I will not be sitting with my back to any doors,” Miranda informed Peter brusquely, not caring in the least that he had had his mouth open to speak to her.

“No,” said Peter. “I understand.”

Miranda turned around to properly face James. She caught his desperate gaze and held it with the same resolve with which she still gripped the hilt of Colonel Rhett’s sword. “It is all right,” she said to him, wishing by her words she could make it so. “We are all right now.”

He looked at the door Colonel Rhett had entered and departed by, where Peter still stood. He looked down to Colonel Rhett’s pistol on the ground at the foot of the pillar. He looked at Miranda, raised a trembling hand and laid it over her cheek. “If I had lost you…” he rasped, his voice shaking even harder than his hand.

“You have not,” Miranda said, acutely conscious of Peter and any number of Peter’s men who might come barging into the room at any moment. She put her hand over James’s, drew it down and kissed his knuckles where they bled. Her own blood still coated her tongue; none of it made any matter. “Nothing has been lost.”

Peter went to inspect his chair, lying in the corner of the room where the colonel had thrown it. He knelt and carefully tested its joints, frowning over two wobbly legs and a partially-detached arm. He did not turn fully away from Miranda and James, but he was not looking at them either.

“Go on,” Miranda said to James in a low voice. She walked with him around the table, past the clock and past Peter’s place and past Abigail’s, all the way to the far end where James had been seated. Miranda went back to collect Abigail’s chair; Peter left his lying in the corner, took the one that had been Miranda’s and returned to his place at the head of the table, his eyes still carefully averted. He took a cloth from the table and wiped his face; the wound still bled when he took the stained cloth away, but he did not press it again to his cheek until he had taken first one long drink and then another. Miranda eased James down into one chair and then sat down beside him on the other. 

“Miranda,” Peter said when he finally looked down the table at them, one bloody cloth thrown onto the table and a cleaner one wadded against his cheek. “The sword.”

“She fears for her life,” James said hoarsely. “Your man tried to kill her.”

Peter shook his head helplessly. “Just put it somewhere where it cannot be seen,” he said. “Please.”

James somehow managed to give Miranda a reassuring nod as he took the sword from her hand and balanced it carefully against the table leg. He patted her knee under the table and then squeezed it gently. 

“Two weeks,” Miranda said to Peter, resting her hand atop James’s and willing as much calm into him as she had to spare. It was not very much, but it would have to do. “Really?”

Peter met her eyes reluctantly. No doubt he regretted giving himself so little time to find his solution, but he had said it and now he must justify it.

“If all goes smoothly, yes,” he said. “It should take no longer than two weeks.”

There was a firm knock on the door behind Peter. James sat bolt upright; Miranda reached instinctively for the sword. Peter winced, pulled the cloth away from his cheek, stood and turned around. “Yes.”

A flustered-looking man stepped through, musket in hand. “My lord,” he said. “Colonel Rhett –”

“No door of this room is to open until it is opened from the inside,” Peter said briskly. “This is by my personal order. Relay it widely. Go.”

The man hesitated, looking around the room. He could not see the bloody cloth on the table; Peter stood in his way. He could not see Colonel Rhett’s sword, hidden as it was under the table. He could not see Colonel Rhett’s pistol on the floor, as the pillar hid it from his view. He took in the damaged chair in one corner of the room and the smear of blood on his governor’s cheek, and he looked for a moment at Miranda and James sitting together at the end of the table. His eyes were wary, but he nodded, said, “Yes, my lord,” walked out of the room and closed the door behind him.

“If all goes smoothly,” Miranda said, reaching for James’s drink and speaking as though they had not been interrupted at all. “I see.”

“I would like to explain it to you,” Peter said, sitting down and bringing the cloth to his cheek once more.

“To Bethlem and then away,” James said, his voice thick.

“Yes,” Peter said. “Alfred Hamilton came to me, as you know. He asked for my assistance at first, and then, when I was not inclined to give it, he insisted on my cooperation.”

“Your family’s standing,” Miranda said, taking another drink to try to wash the taste of blood from her mouth. 

“I resisted him at first. I did not want to do any of this. But Alfred assured me Thomas would not be long in Bethlem. He said he would be taken away somewhere he would be looked after and able to live in peace and safety. He did not tell me where; I learned of it later, after his death.”

“You weighed your family’s standing and your daughter’s future against Thomas’s entire life, James’s life and mine, and you made your decision.”

“I did not want –”

“They could have hanged him,” Miranda said. “If James had not done exactly as he was bid, he would have been _hanged_.”

“Miranda,” James said. “Do not –”

“If I had reached no agreement with Alfred, the alternatives would have been much worse than that,” Peter said intently. “This way, James did have some choice in the matter. You left the country with your lives. Thomas left the country with his life. We are all alive, Miranda. That is what I won for us.”

“Don’t you fucking say that,” James said, his voice deep and heavy. “Don’t you turn this into –” 

“I am trying to explain –”

“Don’t.”

Peter fell silent. Miranda would have been grateful for that if it were not for the relentless ticking of the clock standing in the corner, taunting and tormenting her as it had from the moment she had recognised it.

“Where is he?” James asked.

“I will send word to have him brought here,” Peter said. “I cannot disclose his location to you.”

“Why?”

“Because it is a secret,” Peter said sharply. 

“Oh, it’s a secret,” James said, nodding slowly. “Of course.”

“I have no proof of it now,” Peter said. “I have already told you as much. I would have preferred to make arrangements quietly so that I would not have to make this claim without proof, but this is where we find ourselves and we must make do with what we have.”

“And what is it that we have?” Miranda asked him.

“Time,” he said. “We have time to work our way through it.”

“My men will not wait forever,” James said.

Miranda looked at him in some consternation. She had quite forgotten about the existence of all those men, of the ship at anchor in the bay, of New Providence Island and all its intrigues. Even now, having been reminded, she had no thought to spare for any of it – she wondered at James, that he did.

“We will work our way through it all,” Peter said. “You have had a long journey, and –”

“It is not a long journey at all,” James said disdainfully.

Peter ignored him. “I will have you taken back up to your room,” he said. “I will put no guard outside your door, but I will put two on the stairs.”

“For our protection or yours?” Miranda asked lightly.

“For everybody’s peace of mind.”

James stood and took a moment to slide Colonel Rhett’s sword into his belt, drawing his coat carefully over it when he was done. Peter watched him do it, his lips pressed tightly together and something twitching in his jaw. “You’ll understand,” James said, offering Miranda his hand and drawing her to her feet beside him.

“I will go with you upstairs,” Peter said, getting wearily to his feet and waving them toward the double doors behind him. He pulled the cloth from his cheek again, checking it for fresh blood. “I will walk with you and demonstrate publicly our cooperation and mutual trust.”

Miranda tucked her hand into the crook of James’s elbow and sought to adopt the dignified, stately bearing that had always come to her so easily when she walked arm in arm with Thomas. James was not the partner for it – he stood too stiffly, too separately, too self-consciously – but Miranda found enough of her old self in the attempt that she could hold her head high and smile at Peter as they started for the door. “Won’t that be a sight to see.”

* * *

James was not angry, and that was how Miranda knew he had been properly tempted. He had said nothing at all as they readied themselves for bed, helping Miranda take her hair down and her dress off with absent-minded efficiency before stowing the sword under the bed and joining her in it, his mind clearly caught up in something far, far away from the four walls that presently made up the boundaries of Miranda’s entire universe.

In a dream, Miranda knew. A tantalising, bewitching, impossible dream. _Thomas was sent to Bethlem and then away again,_ Peter had said. _Alfred assured me Thomas would not be long in Bethlem. Thomas left the country with his life._

Peter was a true politician; he would make no claim that could be easily disproved or denied. All those years ago, Miranda and James had only had Peter’s word that Thomas had died. They now had only Peter’s word that he had not. Miranda could point to this as indisputable proof that Peter was a liar, but she could not prove to James which had been the lie. 

She could argue to her last breath that the whole thing was so tremendously unlikely as to be all but impossible, but James would seize on the “all but”, as he had done so many times before. Rising to the rank of lieutenant as the son of a mere carpenter had been all but impossible. Securing a universal pardon for the pirates of Nassau had been all but impossible. Bringing all of Nassau under the power of one newly-arrived stranger, friendless and shipless and torn apart by grief, had been all but impossible. Locating the _Urca de Lima_ had been all but impossible. Stealing Abigail from Captain Vane’s fort and bringing her to Charles Town with his crew’s backing had been all but impossible. “All but impossible” did not mean the same thing to James as it meant to most men. “All but impossible” was an invitation to prove the whole world wrong.

James lay quietly on his back beside Miranda, his breathing calm and steady as he allowed himself the dream. To attempt to take it away from him entirely was fraught with the worst kind of danger and highly unlikely to succeed, but his hopes must at least be tempered, or catastrophe loomed. Everything Miranda knew to be indisputably true cast them both in the greatest danger; every speculation was a wicked, teasing thing that promised everything but refused to show its hand. It had taken such a dreadfully long time for James to find any kind of stability after Thomas had been taken from them the first time, and there was more than a little euphemism in naming it stability. He became constant in his obsession; he was at all times engrossed in the conflict that his life had become. If it were to happen again – if James set his heart on Thomas’s return and then that dream was taken from him – there would be no coming back from it. There could be no coming back from it. 

If Peter had lied about this, Miranda would kill him with her own bare hands.

“He said two weeks,” James said softly, as though continuing a conversation they had been having. “Two.”

“James, my dear,” Miranda said. She stroked his arm where it rested on top of the covers, her heart twisting as she contemplated the impossible choice she had before her: breaking his now, as gently as she knew how to, or standing by and allowing it to be broken by another later – by _Peter_ – in circumstances entirely out of her control. “Do not lose yourself in hope.”

“A month would be plausible,” he said to the ceiling, sounding as reasonable as he ever had. “If he was constructing a lie to buy himself any considerable time, he could have said a month, two months, three. If he was constructing a lie to buy himself only a moment, he could have said a week, or only days. He could have said so many things. He said two weeks.”

“James…”

He rolled over to her, heavy and slow-moving in the bed. “Miranda,” he said, brushing his fingers over her hair. But he had no more to say than that.

If James held out hope, then Miranda could not. She had put her grief aside for James’s far too many times already; she could not do it again. At least one of them must be willing to see things as they were.

“Never do that again,” James said, his hand still resting in her hair. “Please do not ever do that again.”

James’s anger may have passed, but Miranda’s roused in her startlingly quickly. “Oh?”

“We have come all this way,” James said. “Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, he pulls that trigger and you fall dead on the floor, and everything we have fought for is for nothing.”

James had been battered, bruised and deeply shaken by the events of the day, but he still ought to know far better than that. That he would speak to Miranda in such a way about managing anger, about self-preservation and assessment of risk, was utterly unconscionable. “Should I have said nothing, then?” she asked. He flinched at her tone, but he did not pull his hand away. “Are you so consumed by the lie he has told us that you have already forgotten the truth he confessed only seconds before?”

James’s fingers twitched nervously against her scalp, and Miranda heard him swallow. “If he lives,” he said, his voice muffled and low. “Miranda, if he lives.”

Miranda stared up into darkness, tears seeping from her eyes and sliding slowly down into her hair and behind her ears. What she would not give to have Thomas back with her: his extraordinary mind, his enormous heart, his bright eyes and his odd little smile. A man who could talk the ear off an elephant but also, miraculously, loved to be talked _to_ and wanted to understand and improve the whole world. Miranda missed him with a dull ache that would never leave her; she could not bear to have it grow into anything sharper, not after all this time. 

“And if he does not?” she said, hearing the tears in her voice and hoping to God that James would not take it into his head to be tender with her now.

“If he does not, then Peter has something else in mind for us and it is nothing good,” James said. “I will put a knife in your hand and clear a path for you.”

Miranda closed her eyes and let James’s proposal soothe her for a moment – both the prospect of doing it, and the fact that James had retained enough of his good sense to apply his mind to all possible outcomes, not only the one he most wanted. “And then everything we have fought for will be for nothing.”

“Pirates took Nassau ten years ago by deposing a governor,” James said, his voice as soft as a breath of silk. “There is more than one way to change the world.”

The fire she had imagined for Charles Town still crackled in Miranda’s vision, bright and tantalising. If Peter betrayed them this second time, if the world broke faith with her and James yet again, what was left for them but rage? If James could not be brought back from it, why should Miranda not join him in it instead?

“But he said two weeks,” James said in as fervent a prayer as Miranda had ever heard from him. “He would not have said two weeks without a reason for it.”

Miranda was eternally grateful that she did not love as James did; for as long as he lived and whatever may become of him, he would long for Thomas, and anyone who knew it would wield the greatest of power over him. It had been ten years, ten unthinkably long years, and he was as vulnerable to it now as he had ever been. Peter could have offered any amount of time between a day and a year and James would be able to find hope in it somewhere, so powerfully did his heart hold sway over his head.

Miranda remembered her own happiness like a distant strain of familiar music in an unfamiliar house; she felt the pull of it in her heart but could never track down its source before it faded and she was left once more in silence. James’s happiness, by contrast, was vivid in her memory – Lord, he had been happy – but it was the memory of one single moment in time, golden and beautiful, that had never had the chance to settle into anything so well-worn as to be forgettable. The thought of seeing him that way again – but Miranda was not thinking of that. She was remembering what had become of him last time he had held out hope for something that Miranda knew to be impossible. 

“I walked away from him once at your behest,” James said, struggling through the words as though they were a fiercely-blowing headwind. “I cannot do it again. Do not ask me to do it again.”

“James, I –”

“Please do not ask me to do it again.”

“How could he possibly be here?” Miranda said as gently as she could. “Alive after all these years, and able to be produced in Charles Town within two weeks, when Peter had no advance notice of our journey here? It is beyond improbable, James. It defies understanding.”

“You said you wanted our old life back.”

“I said I did not wish to forget it.”

“I cannot forget it,” James said abruptly. “I close my eyes, and –”

“Oh, my dear,” Miranda said. She turned to him and touched her brow to his, feeling like she might fly into a thousand pieces from such close proximity to his grief. “I know.”

He drew in a deep, shuddering breath and let it out again. “You survived today only by a miracle,” he said, his voice strained and desperate. “If you had been killed, neither I nor the man who killed you would have left that room alive. Fate has intervened such that you and I both live to see this moment. It is beyond improbable, given all that has occurred today, that we both will see tomorrow, but so it will very likely be. Such intervention is not – the odds may be remote, but there is always the chance for the impossible to occur. I will not turn my back on it. We have come this far.”

“All right,” Miranda said, laying her hand against his cheek. There would be no arguing with him on this point, not now, and if she listened to him too long she might find herself convinced. “Let us see what tomorrow will bring.”

“I will have to think what message I send back to the ship,” he said as though Miranda could possibly be concerned with such things, as though the way his mind turned so smoothly from Thomas to Nassau was anything but an old and bitter enemy of hers. “I certainly cannot tell them the true reason for this delay of a fortnight.”

“Leave thoughts of that until tomorrow,” she said firmly. “We may not be permitted to send anything. The message they receive might be Peter’s alone.”

James sighed. “We will see what tomorrow may bring.” He drew his hand slowly out of Miranda’s hair and then rolled away from her, settling into the bed as though he intended to sleep. Miranda knew perfectly well he would not, but there was nothing to be done about that. Tomorrow would bring what tomorrow would bring, and there was nothing to be done about any of it now.


	2. Chapter 2

Miranda woke to see a faint glow of sunlight around the curtains, where the previous time she had woken, and the time before that, and the time before that, she had opened her eyes to perfect darkness, closed them again and slid easily back into sleep. Now that the sun had risen, there was something to see and something to think about, and so Miranda came fully, reluctantly awake. Much as she would prefer to close her eyes, nestle into her pillow and return to blissful ignorance of the world, there was nothing for it but to accept that this day, the first of Peter’s fourteen, had properly begun.

It was a relief to wake in a proper bed and rather than a hammock, but that was the only comfort that Miranda could take from her present situation. With a touch of light in the room and the awakening of all her other senses, the wrongness of the room was painfully apparent. It smelled wrong; it sounded wrong; it _felt_ wrong. The bed was too large, too grand, too soft. The window was in the wrong place. The door was in the wrong place. Miranda had spent the last ten years of her life waking up in the same bed, in the same room, and though it had not always been a happy room, it had always been hers. She had lived there, and she had given it life. Were it not for James lying behind her now, with one hand on her hip and his breath warm on her neck, Miranda might think herself as lifeless as this empty room, this stifling house, this godforsaken town where they hanged men for piracy and left them dangling in the streets. She had seen much worse in Nassau, of course, but Nassau did not pretend to be anything other than what it was. Men were wild in Nassau, wild and crude and dangerous, but Charles Town was sinister in a way Miranda had never encountered before. She did not like to think of it. She would not think of it now.

“Did you sleep?” she asked, reaching behind her head to find James’s, to tangle her fingers in his hair for a moment and then stroke it back down. 

“A little.”

Miranda turned herself around to face him, but in doing so her elbow dug a little into his chest and he shrank back, expelling a short, pained breath and taking most of his weight onto his arms as he moved himself a little further away. 

When there was more light to see by, Miranda would insist on knowing the extent of his injuries, but that would require drawing the curtains, and she was not yet minded to do it. The world outside this room was no friend of theirs, and Miranda would not invite it in before its time. Instead she shifted forward to make up the small distance between them, moving a good deal more carefully now that she had been reminded not only of the outrage of the beating James had taken but also its physical consequences. He lay half-propped up on one elbow as she approached and lowered himself back down once she had settled, brushing her hair aside and leaning forward to kiss her brow. His fingers were soft, and his lips were warm, and both lingered for some considerable time. As James’s fingers wove themselves slowly into the hair at her temple, Miranda slid a hand under his shirt and ran it up his side, so lightly it could not possibly cause him any pain – so lightly, in fact, that his skin twitched and jumped at the touch. He went still to feel it, for three long breaths up to the middle of his ribs and then three long breaths down again. When Miranda’s hand came to rest at the small of his back, he nuzzled at her hair for a moment and then pressed his brow against hers, cupping the side of her head with his hand and brushing across her cheekbone with his thumb.

None of these things were new, but Miranda had never experienced them in quite this way before. James McGraw had been affectionate and considerate; he had known what Miranda wanted from him and quite happily provided it. He had loved her easily and well. James Flint had loved her deeply, even desperately, but there was less of him to give and even less that could be given freely. This was – Miranda did not know what this was. She could tease and flirt with James McGraw and return his attentions in kind; James Flint’s affection, when he could spare it, was never easy, and so Miranda must manage him carefully in order to protect them both. The man Miranda lay with now was neither and both, and Miranda did not at all know what to do with him.

“What are your thoughts this morning?” she asked, in the hope that one or the other would answer her and she would know how to proceed.

“I think we must be very careful,” James said, sincere and serious, and Miranda still could not place him. “I think that which was averted yesterday is by no means averted permanently. I think we must continue to be very, very careful.”

“For two weeks?”

“Yes.”

“And after two weeks have passed?”

The thumb on Miranda’s cheek stilled, and for a moment she thought she had broken whatever spell had been cast over James as she had slept much of the night and he had lain awake. She steeled herself to have him pull away from her, to lose both the hand holding her head and the softness in his voice and to settle back into what had become familiar between them.

But after a quiet, heavy moment in which Miranda was conscious of nothing but the tremendous strain her question had caused him, James let out a shaky breath and relaxed into her again. “Whatever happens, I will not lose you,” he said, his voice low and gruff. “Whatever care that necessitates taking, I will take it, and I ask you to do the same. I will not lose you, Miranda.”

“I cannot bear to look at him,” Miranda whispered. “I cannot even _think_ of him without feeling the most –”

“I know,” James said darkly, smoothing a hand over her hair. “But it cannot find voice here and now.”

“Here and now it can,” Miranda pointed out. “We are quite alone.”

“Well, yes,” James allowed. “But outside this –”

“I will be the very picture of propriety,” Miranda promised, making her voice a little lighter, a little brisker, and removing her hand from inside his shirt. He did not resist when she withdrew back to her side of the bed; he only lay still and watched her.

It was not that Miranda did not appreciate James’s very focused attention. It was not that she did not _like_ it. 

“I will smile at him, if you like,” she continued. “I will call him ‘my lord’ and curtsey whenever our paths might cross.”

“Miranda,” James said reprovingly, but there was laughter in his voice.

Miranda knew teasing. She knew the tone she should use and how to inflect her words. She knew the kinds of things that made James laugh. “It is only proper,” she insisted.

James let out a laughing breath and did not argue with her. 

“I do not know that the colonel will tolerate our holding onto his sword for two whole weeks,” Miranda said to him. “Do you think we should return it to him?”

“If he wished to keep it, he should have held onto it in the first place,” James said. Miranda heard his neck crackle as he tilted it first one way and then the other. “Terrible form.”

“A very poor showing,” Miranda agreed, shuffling to the edge of the bed and setting her feet lightly on the smooth wooden floor. “They’ll make just anybody a colonel these days.”

She rose and went to the window, dressed though she was only in her undergarments, and drew the curtains halfway, flooding the room with quite dazzling light. 

A rumpled James was a sight Miranda always appreciated. Here, sitting up in bed with his hair quite wild around his head and glowing in the warm sunlight, he was well worth taking a moment to admire. He squinted toward her for a moment but immediately looked away again, blinking the sun’s glare from his eyes and beginning to restore a little order to his hair.

“Shirt off, please,” Miranda said, coming back to the bed.

He froze, blinking rather stupidly. “What?”

“Off, please.”

“There is nothing else for me to wear.”

“I know that,” Miranda said, first kneeling beside him and then sitting back on her heels. “I want to have a look at you.”

He looked sideways at her, his expression dubious. “To what end? Bruises do not heal any faster for having been looked at.”

“You do not have a history of being forthcoming with me about your physical state,” Miranda said, tugging at the back of his collar. “And so I must conduct my own investigations.”

“It is only bruises,” James insisted, wiggling a little away from her. Miranda searched around his hips for the bottom of the shirt and began to tug; he sighed and gingerly raised his arms so she could lift the thing over his head. It really was foul, having been worn and slept in and fought in out of all proportion to the number of times it had been washed, but it truly was all he had for the time being, so Miranda shook it out and draped it across the chest at the foot of the bed before making her way back to James. He sat and awaited her patiently, shirtless and unresisting; that, too, was a sight Miranda could never tire of.

“There,” she said, pressing gently around the bottom of his ribs where the bruises were beginning to show. “Was that so hard?”

“It is not necessary,” he said with weary forbearance.

“Does this hurt?”

“You know perfectly well that it hurts.”

“Let me see your back.”

James scooted forward and bent obediently under her hand. Miranda passed a palm slowly up his back, between his shoulder blades and then up the back of his neck and into his hair, where the first and most cowardly blow had been struck.

“Don’t touch that,” he said shortly, leaning away from her hand. “I will be as forthcoming about it as you like. Just don’t touch it.”

Miranda came back around to look him in the eye. “Yes?”

“It is not bleeding,” James said, slowly straightening again. “It hurts, and there is a lump. It will go down fastest if it is not meddled with.”

“It hurts?”

He smiled crookedly. “Being hit over the head does tend to.”

Miranda would have liked to return that smile, but she found herself incapable of it. The sheer amount of violence James had been the subject of was not something she could easily comprehend or that she liked to contemplate, and his attitude toward it was even more disquieting. Before Miranda had known him – long, long before she had known him – he had been taught that vulnerability invited violence, and so he had sought to master it: to inflict it without hesitation and withstand it without complaint. That kind of conditioning could not be unravelled quickly or easily, and Thomas had had very little time in which to attempt to do so. 

Miranda had not joined him in that attempt. She had not understood it then as she did now. She had not seen the need. 

“Miranda,” he said quietly.

She did not look at him, beginning instead a much more thorough examination of his injuries. She bypassed the still-healing wound across his chest and the barely-healing hole in his shoulder, forcing herself to look only at the most recent damage and not think on the rest of it. Half a dozen times he had been kicked, at the very least, and they had been heavy boots worn on the feet of men who were certainly not strangers to inflicting violence. Miranda only wished she had had the opportunity to see how they fared when on the receiving end of it, so many against one, as James had been. 

But there was no changing it now. There was no changing any of what had happened yesterday, or last month, or ten years ago. It must be accepted and then dealt with, and so Miranda went along rib by rib, pressing carefully from sternum to side and gauging James’s reaction. Whatever pain he felt, whatever pain she caused him, he sat quietly and withstood it. She did not know how he could sit so still through such treatment, but for her he did, and she was deeply grateful. If he had resisted, or if he had displayed any sign of weakness, she did not know that she could have borne it.

Miranda had never been the jealous or possessive type until everything had been taken from her but this one man in her hands. She had not become so all at once but gradually, as the years passed and James fought doggedly on, committing himself to an unending battle where victory was nebulous at best and impossible at worst while Miranda turned their house into a home and waited for something, anything to change. She hated that she had become so; she hated most of all that when James had become everything to her, she had not become so to him. She needed him, she wanted him, and even when he had been home, part of him had always been somewhere else: with Mr Gates, with the _Walrus_ , with countless pirate captains both friend and foe, with his network of spies across the Caribbean, with Richard Guthrie, with Eleanor Guthrie, with “the street”, with shipping lanes, prizes, articles and consorts, with the _Urca de Lima_ , with Thomas. Now he was here and he was _all_ here, and God only knew what would happen today, let alone tomorrow or next week or two weeks from now. Miranda would make the most of what she had in front of her now, which was James: his muscles and his bones and his bruises. Here she had him and could keep him for a little while longer. Here he sat and let her do as she would, however it hurt him.

“You did not fight back,” she said, moving to his right side when she was satisfied there was no immediate danger on the left.

“I would have been killed,” he murmured.

“And yet at dinner –”

He moved under her hands then, restless. His voice was sharper. “That man is a danger to us as long as there is life in him.”

“If you had seriously injured Colonel Rhett, let alone killed him –”

“Yes,” James said, hanging his head as though scolded by a schoolteacher. “I was not thinking.”

Miranda leaned in and embraced him without a second thought. His arms came quickly up around her and held her close, his whiskers scratching the skin at the crook of her neck and his hair tickling her ear.

“I will not do it again,” he promised her softly. “I will take every care.”

She closed her eyes and breathed him in, remembering other promises he had made her and what had come of them. James’s promises were always genuine, always sincere and always well beyond his capacity to deliver. For now, he would be careful; Miranda only hoped that would be enough, for now, to guarantee his safety. She prayed that it would. She did not ever want to let him go.

Miranda had come impossibly close to death last night, and James along with her, and there was some kind of affinity between the chill in her bones and the warmth she felt creeping over her skin, the warmth of James’s body against hers. The conventional wisdom was that pirates fucked so hard and so freely because their lives were always in danger; every brush with death drove them to affirm their lives in the most primal way of all. Violence and the thrill of combat heated the blood, and that was why Nassau’s brothel did such extraordinary business. Miranda did not need to come close to death in order to affirm her life in such a way – in her day, she really had been quite famous for it – but that did not, it seemed, render her immune to the urge. 

But James held her close and did not move, and Miranda was certain that no such thought had entered his mind. James was in many ways utterly unlike any other man Miranda had known, but this he shared with Thomas, this way of separating one type of passion from another, light from dark. Miranda would think herself cursed by the coincidence if she did not suspect it was a large part of what had drawn her to both of them and then, as she had come to truly know them, solidified that attachment into something permanent and unbreakable. James liked to fuck when he was happy, when he was laughing, when he felt good about himself and his circumstances. He was not driven to it by blood or danger, by anger or despair, and for all that had changed in him over the years of their exile, that, right at the heart of him, remained pure. He might oblige her now if she asked, if she hinted strongly, but Miranda did not want him by way of obligation. She had had enough of that for a lifetime. She wanted him to want again.

“Are you all right?” he asked softly in her ear, and Miranda reluctantly drew back from him, sliding her hands from his back to his right side and resuming her examination. The moment she was done, James took her chin in his hand and tilted her face gently upward. “What are _your_ thoughts this morning?” he asked, his eyes intent on hers.

“I am quite all right,” she assured him. “There are some cracks in your ribs, I think.”

“I know.” He looked at her far more tenderly than Miranda thought fair; as soon as she had had the thought, he took his hand away and lowered his eyes to look down at his own bare chest. “Will you permit me to put my clothes back on now?”

“Surely we will be provided with something a little more appropriate for you to –”

“Miranda,” James said, holding out his hand. 

She shuffled down to the foot of the bed to fetch the shirt, crumpled and malodorous as it was. Instead of handing it to him, she helped him put it back on. James gave her a soft half-smile when it was done, and when she went to dress in her own clothes from yesterday, he followed her from the bed.

His hands lingered on her body as he helped her dress – at a hip, a shoulder, in the small of her back. He intended to comfort her, or comfort himself; he reciprocated, in some way, Miranda’s attentions to him. Where she had poked and prodded, he was utterly gentle – not quite sensual, but much closer to it than he had been for years. Miranda found it very nearly impossible to bear, but she bore it for him as he had for her. He meant well by it; he did not intend to torment her.

Once Miranda’s clothing was all in order James smiled at her again, still neither Flint nor McGraw but somewhere in between the two. There was a depth of sorrow behind that smile that he had never possessed in London, but there was also warmth and openness to a degree that Miranda had so rarely seen since they had left. It was so very tempting to consider the dichotomy dissolved at last, to think that James was himself and all of himself once again, but there was no guarantee that this extraordinary circumstance they found themselves in, this middle ground, would last for any appreciable time. Miranda had counselled James against hope, and she must not fall victim to it herself. So she returned the smile as best she could, took his hand for a moment and then let it go again. 

Thus released from attending to her, James turned toward the mirror, searching through the tangle of his hair at the back of his head for the tie that still held a very little of it together. Miranda crouched down by the bed and pulled Colonel Rhett’s sword out from underneath it, testing the heft of it in her hand. 

“You know we will have to return it,” James said, half-turning toward her as he carefully pulled the tie free.

“Certainly,” said Miranda, “if we are asked to.”

He beckoned her over, and she came. He put his hand over hers on the hilt, adjusting her grip with firm fingers and then letting go again. Two of his knuckles were bruised and still a little bloody; Miranda remembered the impact they had made against Peter’s face – the sharp _crack_ – and her spirits lifted a little. “Like that,” James said, turning back to the mirror and frowning at what he saw.

“You look a good deal less menacing when you leave your hair loose,” Miranda advised him, holding the sword straight out in front of her, looking down the line of it and picturing Peter at its end.

“And you look far less menacing without a sword in your hand,” James said, his face crinkled in discomfort as he very roughly combed through his hair with his fingers.

“I intend to strike terror into their hearts.”

He laughed then, looking at her through the mirror with an honest-to-goodness grin. “We can work on that.”

Miranda had no difficulty at all returning that expression in kind. Even after James looked away to resume frowning at his hair, when the weight of the sword became too much for Miranda’s arm and she had to lower it, she felt the smile lingering on her lips.

Three heavy knocks at the door made Miranda startle and hurry to stow the sword back beneath the bed; the chill came back into her bones as she straightened. James abandoned his efforts at the mirror and came to stand by her, taking her hand firmly in his. “Come,” he said.

The door opened to reveal not the slave who had summoned them to dinner the previous night but a white man with a military bearing, dressed in the same dull blue and green as the men who had assaulted James but with no weapons either on his belt or in his hand. “Breakfast with the governor in half an hour,” he said brusquely. “I’m instructed to ask if there’s anything you’ll be needing before then.”

James looked him up and down and did not seem much impressed with what he saw. When he spoke, he did so with barely-concealed disdain. “A hairbrush, if you please.”

“Two hairbrushes,” Miranda said quickly, “if we have only half an hour to make ourselves presentable.”

She saw that the banality of the request pained him and was tempted to add to it – she would like clean clothes, warm water and a towel, a vase of fresh flowers, another mirror so that she and James would not have to share, a pistol she could keep loaded and carry with her everywhere she went – but she remembered her promise to James and held her tongue. 

“Yes, ma’am,” he said sourly. “Right away.”

He went away without a bow or even a nod. As soon as he was gone, James rolled his eyes and went back to the mirror. “What the fuck is the point of sending a militiaman in place of a house slave if he is to go about unarmed?” he said. “As policies go, it is utterly incoherent.”

Miranda did not reply to him; she walked away from the bed and back into the sunlight streaming through the window, willing it to chase away the chill that haunted her body. She did not want to puzzle out Peter’s thinking. She did not want to see his face, hear his voice or so much as remember his existence. She hated him so powerfully it made her hands shake and her heart quicken; the power he held over them made her sick to her stomach. 

James glanced over his shoulder at her and then back at the mirror. “I would not bring the sword to breakfast,” he advised her wryly. “He might take it ill.”

Miranda expelled a breath of something that might well have been laughter, though it might equally have been a sob. Whatever it was, James recognised and understood it. When their eyes met in the mirror, Miranda saw him as clearly as she ever had. 

_Partners,_ that look said _._ Miranda held the word close to her heart as she closed her eyes and let the sun warm her. 

* * *

On the way downstairs to breakfast, Miranda kept her resolution firmly in mind. She was not going to endanger herself, and she was not going to endanger James. She would take care not to provoke Peter. She would not scream at him, shout at him or attempt to stab him. She would comport herself calmly and sensibly, as the occasion demanded. She was no stranger to the requirement, but she had never needed to carry it out under such extraordinary provocation as this. It had been a very long time since she had needed to carry it out at all.

She could not help but smile when she saw Peter’s face, his left cheek bruised and swollen and the pain of it showing plainly in his eyes. The sight of it warmed her more thoroughly than the sun had; she would heartily compliment James on the strength and placement of his blow when they were next alone.

“Good morning,” she bid Peter quite cheerfully, taking one of the two seats set along the side of the table, where she and James could sit with their backs to the wall. James shot her a wary look as he sat beside her, but it did not lessen Miranda’s satisfaction. She had not been the one to hit Peter, much as she would have liked to. James could regret his actions, and he could worry about the consequences of the blow; Miranda was free to enjoy the result of it, which was quite magnificent.

“Good morning,” Peter said stiffly, moving his face as little as he possibly could as he spoke. He waved for the door to be closed again and took his seat at the head of the table, leaving the three of them alone in the room. “I trust your accommodations have been satisfactory?”

“We have nothing to wear,” Miranda informed him.

“I know. I have been making arrangements this morning, and you will soon be provided for properly.”

“I see.”

Miranda poured tea for James and then for herself, adding a little sugar to her own cup. She took a sip and then added another spoonful; if this was what passed for tea in Charles Town, it was a much ruder place than Miranda had been led to believe. A quick look over the table only supported such an assessment; just like at dinner, the food was ample but not particularly appetising. 

Just like at dinner, the Hamiltons’ clock kept its steady beat in the corner.

“I would like to send a message to my ship,” James said, without having so much as looked at the tea Miranda had poured him or any of the food.

Peter pressed his lips together and glanced away from the table for a moment before looking back at James. “Your ship is gone,” he said shortly.

James absorbed that with a stillness that Miranda knew and knew to be dangerous. “Gone,” he said, his nostrils flaring a little.

“Departed overnight,” Peter clarified. “There was no attempt at communication, nor any hostile intent shown. But the ship is most definitely gone.”

“That is convenient for you, is it not?” Miranda asked, selecting a slice of bread and spreading butter carefully over it. The bread, she had to admit, was of finer quality than she was accustomed to in Nassau, but she did not much like the look of the cheese.

“It is and it is not,” Peter replied, seemingly glad of the opportunity to look away from James and at Miranda instead. “If I knew the reason behind it, I would be considerably more at ease.”

“An accusation,” Miranda said, putting her butter knife down. “Extraordinary.”

“I am not accusing –”

“Did your men attempt pursuit?” James asked.

“They did,” Peter said, this time fleeing Miranda’s gaze and landing on James. “That pursuit was successfully evaded.”

James reached for his teacup, but he only turned it ninety degrees on the table with a thumb and one finger. He had never been one to eat so soon after rising. Even at home, he would find something to do, roaming the house and the garden or frowning over books and papers for a few hours before he would sit down and eat. Now he returned the cup to its previous position and stared expectantly at Peter.

“I have sent out patrols,” Peter said. “So far they have turned up nothing.” He was not eating either; Miranda was not sure that he could, with his face in such a state. Miranda took another bite of her bread. 

“So far,” James said. “It is barely nine-thirty.” For a moment, the clock ticked even louder in Miranda’s ears. 

“I will have another report in the afternoon,” Peter said. “I do not expect to hear anything different than I already have.” 

Practically speaking, the departure of James’s ship from the bay simplified a number of things. The ship’s absence meant there would be less tension in the town, which should translate to less immediate fear of its captain. There was no longer any risk of any of James’s crew doing anything intentional or ill-considered that could bring destruction down upon them all. James would not be as preoccupied with his duties to his ship and his island and so could devote his efforts entirely to his own survival, which may well take every ounce of grit and resourcefulness he possessed.

James knew all these things. He knew as well as Miranda did that there had been no prospect of their going back on board that ship for a good long while. Even if Peter had agreed to the plan and they were making preparations to sail to Nassau, the governor of Carolina could not have sailed with Captain Flint on a Spanish warship. He could not have Captain Flint sailing in consort with him on a Spanish warship. But Miranda knew what that ship meant to James. She knew what it stood for in his heart as well as what it meant for the viability of the plan they had presented to Peter. If it had indeed disappeared, it was a blow to him in far more than a tactical sense.

Peter was frowning at James, attempting to read his grim, closed expression. “It seems that support for your plan is not as steadfast as you have led me to believe,” he said eventually, watching James closely for his reaction.

James finally looked at him, and Peter reared back a little. “I was attacked unprovoked in the street yesterday, and Colonel Rhett attempted to kill Miranda in this very room, unarmed and at dinner,” James said, his voice clear and deep. “I do not put it past your men to have forced mine away, whether acting inside or outside your command. I gave very clear orders to my men that there was to be no fighting – no gun ports open, no weapons on deck, no retaliation to any threat that might be made against them. In the event of any perceived threat, where engagement is forbidden and a decision to take no action could be fatal, a silent retreat is exactly in line with the instructions I have given them.”

“There was no –”

“Between your men and mine, which have proven themselves belligerent and uncontrollable, and which have proven themselves to be resolute and disciplined in the face of danger? It is not the strength of my leadership nor the loyalty of my men that is called into question by this latest development.”

“It is not –”

“James was voted in as captain of that ship,” Miranda said, selecting another slice of bread and taking up a knife to cut the cheese. She spoke calmly, focusing on the work her hands were doing so she would not look at Peter and lose her composure. “He has proven himself and his value to his men over the space of a decade, and he has their genuine and continuing support. Remind me again, Peter, how it was decided you would come into power here, and tell me why any man subject to your command ought to respect it.”

Having spoken her piece, Miranda put the knife down and looked Peter right in the eye. He met her gaze for the briefest of moments then blinked and looked away up at the ceiling.

He was _pathetic_.

“You can’t, then,” she said, taking a careful bite of the cheese. “How surprising.”

Peter ground his teeth as he looked back at her. “This is not easy for any of us,” he said.

“No, it is not easy,” Miranda said. She set down the cheese, which was as tasteless as she had supposed. “And we all know that you like to take the easy option.”

“Whatever the reason for it, the facts are plain,” Peter said. “The ship is gone.”

“By your word, it is gone,” Miranda said. “That is not what I would consider a fact.”

“My word is all you will receive on the matter,” Peter said. “By no means will you be permitted to leave this house for confirmation of it or for any other reason.”

“We are your prisoners now?” Miranda said, her voice rising with her temper. She remembered hearing the click of the gun and James rushing around the table and lowered it again, but her anger was not in the least diminished. “We have come to you in good faith, with a proposal in everyone’s interest, with your own daughter stolen out from under Captain Vane’s nose. Your men beat James and attempt to murder me, and we are now to be prisoners in your home, with my husband’s clock standing in it?”

“Miranda, he is Captain Flint,” Peter said sharply. Miranda clenched her fist tight, tempted as she was to take her cup of tea, her plate, her knife and throw them in his face. “You have admitted to me your role in the murder of Alfred Hamilton. I am doing everything I can to delay a formal trial that would inevitably lead to a public execution. I do not think it is too much to ask that you stay inside this house, where you will be safe from harm and I might keep you out of view of the wider population.”

“Inevitably,” James said. He sat calmly in the corner of Miranda’s vision having not touched food or drink, his hands on the table with the tips of his fingers resting on the edge of his empty plate. Everything about him spoke of cool control. Miranda did not know how he did it.

“You are guilty, James,” Peter said. “If you are tried, then by the laws of this land you must hang.”

“I am not guilty until I am tried and found to be so,” James responded. “Is that not the law of this land?”

“You have confessed to me –”

“And you to us.”

“What I have done is no crime.”

Without even looking, James reached a hand across to press down on Miranda’s shoulder where she would have risen. A scream rose in her throat, and she forced it back down.

“What I mean to say,” Peter said, forcing evenness into his tone as Miranda sat and shook with fury, biting her lip so strongly blood welled from it, only the pressure of James’s hand tethering her to the promise she had made him, “is that in coming here publicly –”

“Stop talking,” James bit out, his voice choked and furious, and Peter did so immediately. The only sound in the room was the damned clock, ticking steadily behind Miranda and to the left.

“Move the clock,” she said as soon as she could force the words out, the taste of blood in her mouth yet again. “If you do not move it –”

“I will move it,” Peter said quickly. 

“Burn it.”

“I –”

“And burn whatever else you have of his,” Miranda said. “You have poisoned it all.”

James squeezed her shoulder and lifted his hand away; Miranda felt a sudden thrill of freedom, and then a wave of despondency came over her. She had promised James she would behave, and she had not. She could not. There was no hope to be had here. To pretend there was, to show the least bit of respect or goodwill to this man who had been the undoing of them all, was utterly unendurable. James had asked her to do it and trusted that she would. He trusted her, somehow, to do the impossible, and he held out hope that the impossible might come to pass, and Miranda could not be the one to snuff out that hope. She simply could not. Peter did not have to lift a finger now to ensure Miranda’s compliance; he had secured it by the promise he had made to James the day before, and he knew it as well as she did. He knew _exactly_ what he was doing to her.

“You say we are safe in this house,” James said to Peter, nothing but business in his voice.

“You are under my personal protection, for the time being,” Peter said to him, sounding much the same. “I have had words with Colonel Rhett.”

“For the time being?” Miranda said, her voice sounding thin in her own ears. “How long is that?”

“Until circumstances change or my hand is forced,” Peter said. 

He was talking down to her. Something was going to snapinside Miranda very soon, and she did not know how to stop it. “I wonder that you even bother with any assurance when it has as little substance as that.”

“And what more do you think you are entitled to?”

“An unconditional pardon,” Miranda said without hesitation.

“Miranda,” said Peter, still with that fucking _tone_ in his voice. “I cannot simply grant unconditional pardons to Captain Flint and his –” Here he faltered and had the grace to at least look uncomfortable.

“Yes? And his what?”

Peter cleared his throat. “And his criminal associates.”

“Not a pardon, then,” said James. “An acquittal.”

“An acqui – for God’s sake, James. An acquittal?”

James shrugged. “Any jury that sits in judgement of us will be very carefully selected, I am sure. It is no less a distortion of justice to select a jury that will decide in our favour than one guaranteed to return a guilty verdict. You know back channels as well as any.”

“I cannot – I am the governor of the Carolina colony. You are –”

“It should not present a challenge, then,” Miranda said. “A man in such a powerful position may exert his will as he likes.”

“You know it is not so.”

“Do I?”

Peter looked to James, but James did not rescue him. James did not so much as look at him. He sat where he was, and he waited for Peter to respond.

Miranda found she had had enough of Peter’s responses. She did not want to hear anything he might think to say, not now and not ever. “We can discuss it again when Thomas arrives,” she suggested, taking a sip of her lukewarm, over-sweetened tea. “I trust you do not intend to bring him here and then have us executed anyway.”

“No,” said Peter. “I do not.”

James swung his head up to stare at Peter.

“I do intend to bring him here,” Peter said quickly. “I have sent for him, as I said. But the resolution of the legal side of things is not simple and cannot be resolved as easily as you might wish. I have not yet had a day to put my mind to it in earnest.”

James narrowed his eyes.

“There is much for me to attend to,” Peter said, standing up and adjusting his jacket. “You will be escorted back to your room after you are finished here, and I ask that you remain there until sent for again.”

“Of course,” James said before Miranda could protest. 

Peter nodded and stepped back from the table.

“And if your men do manage to locate my ship, I trust I will be consulted.”

Peter nodded to James, glanced warily at Miranda and departed the room. 

“There was a time I was proud to know that man,” James said once the door had closed behind him, leaning back in his chair and shaking his head. “Honest, I thought him, and righteous.”

 _We were all better in Thomas’s presence_ , Miranda thought, and the thought pierced her so deeply that for a moment she could not breathe. Her anger collapsed, and all her strength with it. When the door opened again and one of Peter’s men came to stand just inside it, this one most definitely armed, all it roused in her was a kind of resigned despair. 

“Shall we go?” she said. “I find I have little appetite.”

“Yeah.” James stood and offered Miranda a hand up, and she took it. Their guard accompanied them in silence back to their room.

As soon as they were alone, James’s control fell away. 

“Why the _fuck_ would they leave?” he said, not loudly but with considerable feeling. “What are they _thinking_?”

Miranda went to sit in the window, where the wood was warm under the morning sun. The grass outside was green and looked very soft. There were red rhododendrons growing by the path. On the other side of the lawn was a small orchard, and toward the back of the house Miranda could see the corner of the kitchen garden. It was a pleasant view and Miranda tried her best to enjoy it, not permitting herself thoughts of lonely maidens imprisoned in towers, their unceasing, bitter solitude and how they must always yearn to go down and touch the things they could see. She did not reflect on the brave knights who came to rescue them or the monsters slain along the way. “Perhaps it is as you said to Peter,” she said.

James snorted and began to pace back and forth along the rug. “Perhaps. More likely they lost their nerve, with no strong hand to guide them, after hearing nothing from us yesterday. They have run off back to Nassau with their tails between their legs.”

A slave came out of the house from somewhere underneath Miranda’s window and walked around to the back of the house, a basket on her hip. “Do you think so?”

James frowned. “I am trying to make sense of it.”

“Not enough is known for any sense to be made of it by you or by me.”

James was only half-listening to her. His steps rang out louder when they left the rug and fell on the hard wooden floor, then softened when he returned. “I should have known better than to trust a pack of cowards and mutineers to act rationally for even half a day in my absence,” he said, his voice thick with contempt. “They did nothing to earn that ship; the risk was all mine and Silver’s. They voted me back in as captain in their own self-interest, knowing me for a murderer and a traitor. And now that I act truly in their interest, now that I risk your life and mine on the slim chance we can win Peter Ashe to our cause, they turn tail and they run.”

Miranda tore her eyes away from the outdoors and focused back on James, whose anger was building even as Miranda’s had evaporated. “I do not think this gnashing of teeth is particularly helpful,” she said, pointedly mild. 

James continued to pace a little longer but then slowed to a stop, closing his eyes and taking a moment to compose himself. “What am I to do, then?” he said, finally looking at her, exhaustion in every line of his body.

“Win Peter Ashe to our cause,” said Miranda. “It is all that is left to be done.”

“Those men in that ship were the proof I had that my plan has support on the island,” James said, coming to sit by her with shadowed eyes and slumped shoulders. “Without them I have nothing but my word and yours, and you know how little he trusts either.” He looked out across the garden; Miranda was certain he did not see the same things in it that she did. He looked and assessed the lie of the land, satisfied himself there were no apparent dangers, and returned his attention to their conversation.

“That is not the cause I am speaking of,” Miranda said firmly.

“No?” he said in some surprise.

“Our cause,” Miranda said. “You and I.”

He took a moment to think about that, his brow wrinkling and his cheek beginning to twitch. Miranda felt a powerful urge to reach out and still the twitch, to smooth out the wrinkles, to lean into him and have him hold her. _You and I,_ she would whisper. _We are all we have._ He would hold her, and he would pledge himself to that cause, and Peter would not be able to hold the fantasy of Thomas’s return over his head any longer.

“The case to be made is not for Nassau any more,” she said, looking down at the rhododendrons and speaking only of the facts. “Your men have either deserted or fled; even were Peter favourably disposed to our plan, it cannot be carried out in circumstances such as these. All that we can advocate for now is ourselves: for our survival, for our freedom.”

“After all that I have done, we find ourselves here,” James said despairingly. “After all that we have fought for.”

 _Two weeks_ , Miranda wanted to say. _Peter has made us a promise._

It would be unspeakably cruel to say it, when such a hope would never come to anything, when James knew that Miranda herself did not believe it to be possible. She wanted to say it all the same, just to see the glint of hope in his eyes again.

“Peter will soon have no choice but to put me on trial,” James went on. “He is governor here, but he is in thrall to these men as much as they are subordinate to him.”

“He will do everything in his power to avoid it,” said Miranda. “He does not like a public spectacle.”

James’s lip curled. 

“You will accept a pardon, I hope, if he offers you one.”

Then all was quiet but for James’s words ringing in Miranda’s ears. _The moment I sign that pardon, the moment I ask for one, I proclaim to the world that they were right_. James McGraw had begun that sentence and James Flint had ended it, and if Miranda had not known they were one and the same man, if she had not known absolutely she had nothing to fear from him, she would have turned tail and fled. She still dreamed of it sometimes: the animal tilt of his head, the low thrum of his voice, the glassy look in his eye and all that she knew it concealed. _This ends when I grant them my forgiveness, not the other way around._ There had been nothing at all Miranda could say to him about it then. She had, perhaps, said too much. But that time was past. 

A shadow lurked behind James’s eyes as he looked out over the grass, and there was a terrible curl to his mouth, but his voice was level when he spoke. “Yes,” he said. “I will accept it.”

Miranda felt something ease in her that had been holding tense for a very, very long time. 

“But I cannot imagine he would,” James went on. “Not without considerable inducements.”

“We shall see,” Miranda said. “There is much that is yet ahead of us.”

James exhaled heavily and said nothing. Miranda felt much the same way; this day had been quite long enough already, and it was still well before noon. She did not like to imagine the toll that thirteen more days like it might take. 

But then there was no need to imagine it ahead of its time. She would be living through every one of those days whether she liked it or not – that assuming, of course, that Peter would not act until the fortnight had passed. Miranda would not put it past him to do so. Miranda would not put it past him to do anything at all.

“We will make it through today,” she said to James. “It is all we can do.”

“A rocky promontory,” he murmured, looking at her through heavy-lidded eyes.

Miranda sighed and took his hand in hers. “How lucky we are.”


	3. Chapter 3

A little after one o’clock, Miranda and James sat down to lunch with Abigail and a Mrs Griffiths, who was to be her chaperone. Mrs Griffiths was a moderately tall woman of middle age with a full figure, quite beautiful brown hair and an exceedingly stern demeanour. It was a requirement, perhaps, of employment in Peter’s household to be the solemn type, incapable of softness or smiling, much less of laughter. Certainly the man standing guard in the corner of the room appeared to have nothing but scowls to offer, and he offered them equally to both James and Miranda. Miranda would almost have preferred to have Peter in the room, whom she could speak to exactly as she liked and who carried no weapon on his person. Peter, for all that he was and all that he had done, did not visibly wish them dead. Peter knew the truth of what had happened the previous evening; Miranda shuddered to think what might presently pass for fact among his men. 

The solid wall at her back and James at her side bolstered Miranda’s courage; after a nervous beginning, she managed to put the guard and his gun out of her mind and behave as she ought. Mrs Griffiths sat opposite James and Miranda sat opposite Abigail; there was very little conversation to be had. Abigail enquired after James’s health, and Miranda enquired after Abigail’s. Abigail spoke of being grateful to sleep in a proper bed, and Miranda agreed with the sentiment. Miranda paid some compliments to the house and the housekeeping, and Abigail marvelled at the size of the windows and the quality of the light that came through them. Miranda spoke disparagingly of London and its gloom; Abigail confessed she rather missed it. James spoke a little of Cornwall, and Mrs Griffiths of Sussex. Neither spoke directly to the other.

For the most part they ate without speaking, and though the clock was already gone, the memory of it lingered just over Miranda’s left shoulder. She could not hear it tick, knew it was not there, but there was a pulse in her mind that kept the beat and she suddenly, desperately needed to know where it was and what had been done with it. Peter would not burn it, of course, but would he properly hide it away? Would he replace it with another or simply wait until Miranda and James were gone and then put it right back where it had been? Two weeks was not such a very long time. It would barely put him to any trouble at all.

When the meal drew to its close, Abigail asked rather nervously if Lady Hamilton and Mr McGraw would join her in the sitting room for the afternoon. Mrs Griffiths pursed her lips, but she put up no protest, and so Miranda gladly accepted the invitation for both of them. She did not want to go back up to that strange, empty room to while away the hours. If she must while them away, she would much prefer to do so in company, and if sharing Abigail’s company necessitated the presence of Mrs Griffiths and an armed guard, then Miranda would accept that as how things must be. 

James did not resist the invitation, but he did not appear enthused by the prospect. No doubt he would prefer seclusion, the better to brood and daydream in, but it was not what was best for him. As they rose, Miranda observed that Mr McGraw might like something to read while the ladies entertained each other; he shot her a look of such deeply felt gratitude that no one in the room could have failed to see it. Abigail nodded and said she would see if something could be lent from her father’s library. Mrs Griffiths went with her, and so it fell to the guard to show Miranda and James to the sitting room. He did so with unconcealed hostility; James at all times positioned himself between them, shielding Miranda not only from the man’s reach but also from his burning gaze.

When they reached the sitting room, Miranda stepped first through the doorway. James followed her and then stopped in it, turning to face the guard with his feet firmly planted. “This will do,” he said.

“You’re not in charge here, Flint,” the guard sneered. “Stand aside.”

“I will not have you in the room with her,” James said. “I have tolerated a great deal from you already; I am not minded to tolerate a great deal more.”

“You’re not fucking –”

“Go on,” James invited him, and the guard fell silent. Captain Flint had not disappeared for good, it seemed. He stood not three feet from Miranda, and she could see only see the back of him, but there was no mistaking the voice.

“You’re not in charge here,” the guard said again, but there was no longer any vigour in the statement. “I’m under orders to –”

“Unless your orders are to intimidate and threaten, it is best that you do not insist,” James said coolly. “I will leave the door open, and you may watch us from without. We have nothing whatsoever to hide, but I will not have you in the room with her.”

Another man’s voice came from somewhere beyond the door. There was a low discussion, and then the second man spoke in full voice, so that Miranda as well as James could hear him perfectly clearly. “I will be outside this door all afternoon,” he said. “I will be listening.”

“I wish you joy of it,” James said, turning back into the room. Miranda caught a glimpse of an older man’s face, bearded and grim, before he closed the door and she was alone with James once again.

Miranda did not know if she ought to admonish or thank him; before she could do either, he took her hand and leaned down to murmur in her ear. “Abigail made a complaint to her father,” he said. “We will not see that one again.”

“She made –”

“She protects you better than I can.”

“She protects us both,” Miranda said. “Have you forgotten that you were attacked and beaten right before her eyes?”

“No,” James said, his voice dry. “I have not forgotten that.”

“And nor has she, I’m sure.”

A flicker of a frown crossed James’s face, but he nodded. “I’m sure she has not.”

With that settled, Miranda finally looked properly around the room they found themselves in. Its character was much the same as every other room Miranda had seen on the lower level: spacious and sparsely furnished, abundantly lit by sunlight and painted a very unappealing shade of blue. There was a writing desk in the corner by the door and a harpsichord in the centre of the room, set back-to-back with a large sofa. Two cushioned chairs faced the sofa, and all three pieces of furniture vaguely matched the rather dull rug they sat on. There was a clock in the corner here too, standing between the desk and the window, but Miranda would not think of it. It stood a little shorter; it ticked a little lighter. There was no comparison to be drawn.

James wandered to the nearest of the three tall windows and stood there in silhouette with his hands behind his back, his aspect pensive and his bearing remarkably calm. Miranda wanted to join him there, but her presence would draw Abigail and Mrs Griffiths when they came in, and it was abundantly clear to Miranda, as it was to James, that there were very few subjects of conversation he could safely share with Abigail now she was returned to her father’s custody and under the eye of his household staff. In Peter’s house, propriety must rule.

So Miranda left him standing by the window and went to the instrument instead, opening it carefully and taking a seat on the small stool. There was no music on hand to be played, but then she hardly required any. She had been seven years old when she first sat in front of such an instrument, and she had not gone without for any longer than the ten or so months it had taken for James to procure her one in Nassau. That was a humble instrument compared to those Miranda had played in London and the one presently before her, but she found she missed it now. 

When the door opened, Miranda turned her head quickly and caught a glimpse of the man standing outside it as Abigail and Mrs Griffiths came in, Mrs Griffiths carrying a large basket and Abigail a sturdy book bound in red. James too had turned to see them enter; Abigail rather shyly approached him and proffered the volume as Mrs Griffiths closed the door behind them.

“Thank you,” he said, meeting Abigail’s eyes directly as he took it from her. She gave him a tentative smile and nodded, and then Mrs Griffiths ushered her away to sit on one of the two chairs facing the sofa, placing the basket on the floor and quickly equipping herself and Abigail with the needlework that appeared to be their afternoon’s occupation. James walked slowly to the writing desk, turning the book over in his hands as he went. He swung the chair around with one foot to put its back to the wall and then sat down, extending his legs out comfortably in front of him as he opened his book. Miranda looked past James and out of the window for a moment, at the trimmed green lawn and the wooden bench that sat by the path, then turned back to the instrument she sat in front of. Abigail and Mrs Griffiths both sat facing her now, though a little distance away. Mrs Griffiths’s attention to her embroidery was perfect and unbroken; Abigail’s eyes lifted often from her work to peek either at Miranda or at James.

“I should like to speak with Lady Hamilton a moment,” she said just as Miranda had ceased her observation and set her fingers upon the keys. She set down her embroidery and walked around the sofa to hover at the left side of the instrument. Something in her bearing, nervous and hopeful, reminded Miranda of the time she had hurried across a room to Abigail, who had stood and stared, and stared, and stared, before finally closing the distance between them. 

“Come and sit, if you like,” Miranda said, moving across on the stool to make room for her. “Do you play?”

“Yes,” Abigail said, quiet as a breath. “I have been learning these past few years.”

“If you would be willing to play something, I should like to hear it.”

Abigail glanced cautiously at Mrs Griffiths, who had now looked up from her embroidery with eyes that were watchful and reproving. Abigail pressed her lips together, gathered her skirts and sat down next to Miranda. The stool was too small to comfortably seat two, and both of them had to shift about in order to find the proper balance. Once they had found it, Abigail leaned a little into Miranda without looking at her, brushing a delicate hand over the keys instead.

“My father will not tell me which of you struck him to the face,” she said quietly. Mrs Griffiths was no longer watching them, but Miranda had no doubt she was listening closely. “Somehow, I do not think it was you.”

 _I wish it had been_.

Though Miranda had not let the words escape her lips, Abigail evidently saw something of them on her face. “It was deserved, then,” she said, in the merest whisper. “Or he would not now be sitting in this room with us.”

“I thought it was,” Miranda said lightly. “But I will not speak for your father. Come, let me hear you play something.”

It took a great deal of encouragement and a little physical manoeuvring for Abigail to finally begin to play, and even then she would only play snatches of melody with her right hand. She was not particularly talented with music, she claimed, and had not had the chance to practise for many months. So Miranda engaged her in conversation instead, encouraging her to play but allowing her to do so without close observation or comment. They discussed music, and art, and literature. They spoke of Abigail’s school in London and Miranda’s own education, so many years ago now. Mrs Griffiths watched them as she steadily worked needle and thread; James was silent and unseen behind them. There was at least one armed man at the door and likely a patrol in the garden, but in this room there was only Mrs Griffiths. It was a much greater opportunity than Miranda had expected.

Miranda had no doubt that Abigail being permitted to spend time with her and James was a calculated move by Peter, but its precise motive was not yet clear. If Miranda did not know Peter quite so well, she might think it a gesture of sincerity and of trust. If he were a simple coward interested only in the avoidance of conflict, he might place Abigail as a buffer between Miranda and James’s resentment and himself as its target. If he imagined he could win them over, Abigail would be the key to it; the question remained whether he knew how best to deploy her.

Now was not the time to be discussing anything of significance that Mrs Griffiths might report to Peter, but if Peter would make a tool of his daughter, Miranda was not so sentimental or so foolish that she would not make moves of her own. For today, that meant care and warmth toward Abigail – an easy enough task, being no more than Miranda would have done under any other circumstances – but it could not and must not end there. Abigail was attached to Miranda as a kindly figure from her past and to James and Miranda together as her rescuers, two people who had treated her kindly when the rest of the world had been nothing but cruel. That was of great benefit in itself, but more must be made of it, and soon. The attachment must not remain one of nostalgia or a debt that Abigail might feel she owed. She must come to know Miranda Hamilton and James McGraw not as her protectors but as people; she must, above all, see James smile, hear him laugh. It must become absolutely out of the question for Peter to cause any harm to come to his daughter’s closest friends. 

When Abigail’s words began to fumble along with her fingers, when her hand rested heavily on the instrument and made no further attempt to play, Miranda held it in her own for a moment and then let go. “James,” she called out over her shoulder. “Come here a moment.”

Mrs Griffiths’s eyes went to him immediately. Abigail half-turned on the stool and followed her gaze. Miranda did not look; she only waited.

There was a short lull, and then he answered. “What is it?”

“There is something I would ask of you,” Miranda said, catching him in the periphery of her vision as she directed her words toward him.

He set his book down on the desk, rose and walked over to her, his bearing stiff and formal. Abigail ducked her head as he approached; Mrs Griffiths kept a careful eye on them all.

“Yes?” James said once he was standing on Miranda’s other side, blocking the light.

Miranda stood, encouraging Abigail to rise with her. They stood to the side, and Miranda gestured for James to take their place.

“No,” he said, taking half a step back. “I cannot play.”

“James,” Miranda said, fond but firm. 

James looked at Abigail, swallowed and then sat on one edge of the stool, one hand brushing lightly over the keys. He looked near as shy as Abigail had been when Miranda had suggested the same to her, and oh, this was familiar too. His heart had been so young when Miranda had first known him, and where he had been uncertain, he had looked to her. Later there had been Thomas, as well and instead, but Miranda had been first and she still felt the pull of it.

She squeezed in beside him, leaving Abigail to stand to one side and observe. “You remember the scale?” she said, taking his hand and placing it into position.

He obligingly played her a slow major scale, not smoothly but steadily note-by-note, frowning as he watched his fingers strike the keys.

“There,” Miranda said encouragingly.

He let his hand fall back to his lap. “Will that be all?”

“No,” she said. “I was trying to remember the lullaby you taught me.” She played a few notes with her left hand, rich and deep, and James’s eyes went distant for a moment. “I cannot quite remember the melody.”

Abigail went to sit back down by Mrs Griffiths, taking up the embroidery she had not yet made a start on, and Miranda felt James breathe a little easier. He hummed under his breath for Miranda, and she picked out the notes on the instrument as he did. It came back to her easily; the tune was simple enough that if Miranda had muddled over it for fifteen minutes on her own, she would have picked it up again. But if she had done that, she would not have had James watching her fingers as she played, murmuring quiet syllables in a language Miranda did not know at all, carrying the melody but not quite properly singing. She would not be able to take his hand again and help him find the keys, to see him stop thinking about his damn ship and his damn master plan and the cruel promise Peter had made him and live in music for a while, safe and protected from the outside world. 

Miranda focused entirely on James and on the instrument she played, but she had no doubt Abigail was watching them all the while.

* * *

There was an odd mood between James and Miranda as they walked upstairs with their guard trailing behind them. Miranda knew that she was responsible for it; she had played three instruments that afternoon, and of the three of them, James was the most likely to recognise that he had been so used. She had taken him back into their shared past and into his own past before that, and that was never something to be done lightly. Miranda had not done it lightly, but she had done it, and she must be careful to ensure that use never became ill-use. She would look after him now, if he needed looking after, and so answer for the use she had made of him. 

She had intended to do so as soon as they were alone, but when she stepped into the room she was brought up short by the sight that greeted her there. It did not surprise Miranda that servants – or slaves, of course – had been in this room while she and James were downstairs, but they had done a great deal more to it than she had expected. She looked at the freshly-made bed, the marigolds and the small pile of books on the windowsill, the clothes laid out over the bed, the small conveniences arranged on top of the chest and by the basin. She saw that the curtains had been tied back neatly and the rug had been straightened. She thought, _They will have taken the sword_.

“I’ve seen worse prisons,” James said. He walked across to the window and set the book Abigail had given him down atop the pile. He frowned for a moment at the flowers, covering his cheek very briefly with one hand and then dragging it away again. “This is not –” He shook his head and turned away, walking to the bed and beginning to examine the clothes he had been given. 

James had not spared the books more than a glance, but Miranda was curious – curious not only as to what had been delivered to the room unasked for but also as to Abigail’s choice, which Miranda had not yet had a chance to see. She sat in the window between the marigolds and the books, and she looked at the title on the top, and a rush of affection came over her.

“Dear girl,” she said, taking the book into her hands. 

James’s smile was real when he looked up and saw what Miranda was holding. “I cannot say I was surprised.”

“That Peter would have The Pilgrim’s Progress in his library, or that Abigail would choose it for you?”

“Both.” James’s smile lingered for a while, then faded slowly as he looked through the rather dull clothing they had been provided. Miranda could hazard a guess at the direction his thoughts had taken but not at their precise form. Thomas had been quite taken with the notion of the Slough of Despond and had often used it in his arguments centred around shame and forgiveness; Miranda would be quite astonished if he had not spoken of it very particularly with James in all that he had done to set the man he loved free from shame. Miranda had never been privy to any such discussions, but she knew both of them well enough to have an idea how they might have gone.

Miranda would not discuss it with James now; it was likely best not to discuss it with him at all. Instead, she looked instead at the four other volumes they now had at their disposal, and she knew Peter’s hand in them all. La Vida es Sueño was one of Miranda’s favourites and The Improvement of Human Reason one of Thomas’s, so much so that he had gone to the trouble of personally translating passage after passage for Miranda to read and discuss with him. She held a proper English edition in her hands now, and Thomas would have been delighted to see it, but Miranda did not want to read any translation but his. She set it down and turned to the next.

The book entitled A Cruising Voyage Round the World she supposed was intended to appeal to James, though she very much doubted that it would. Peter did not share Thomas’s egalitarian bent nor Miranda’s delight in very thoroughly coming to know the people she liked, and so he had worked with James without really knowing him. Peter tended to see people as he expected them to be; James was then, as now, adept at wielding the expectations of others in order to shield himself. Abigail’s interactions with James had been few and limited, and her experience of the world a great deal more limited, yet her choice for him had been infinitely better-judged.

The fourth volume given to them was a book of philosophy, in French by a man with a German name, whose subject matter was as ambitious as its provision to them no doubt was pointed: the goodness of God, the freedom of man and the origin of evil. Miranda had not seen the term _théodicée_ before, but it was hardly difficult to ascertain its meaning. The book was only five years from its date of publication; in her old life, Miranda would have heard about it within weeks and read it within months, and by the time five years had passed it would be an old friend to her, if it was any good.

“Anything good?” James asked.

“Yes, of course,” Miranda said. “They are Peter’s books. Do you think your Spanish will stand up to Calderón de la Barca?”

“You can read it to me,” James said, wandering over to the dresser and idly opening and closing its drawers. “I understand most of what I hear.”

“Reading it would give you something to –”

“And I like to listen to you,” he added, closing the last drawer he had opened.

La Vida es Sueño was a play, Miranda supposed, and thus better to be read aloud than in one’s own head. She had done so with Thomas before, trading off the roles moment by moment and savouring the sounds of the language on their tongues. Together they had –

This was cold-blooded, even for Peter. Miranda put the book down not carelessly but firmly, rising instead to join James at the dresser. “What’s this?” she asked, picking up one of the small jars on the top, filled with a slick-looking brown substance. She opened it and smelled beeswax, comfrey and lavender. Even those scents combined could not overpower the pervading one of elder.

“Close it, will you?” James said, turning his head away.

Miranda did, but she kept it in her hands. “It will be for your bruises,” she said. “You will need to get used to the smell.”

“No, thank you,” James said. “I prefer the bruises.”

“It will work.”

“Perhaps it will. I prefer the bruises.”

“If this is because Peter has given it to –”

“Of course it is because Peter has given it to us,” James said sharply. “I imagine you would not want it smeared all over you either.”

“You will intentionally weaken yourself out of nothing but pride?”

The look he gave her said, _What do you think?_ The words out of his mouth were, “Peter can go fuck himself.”

“I’m not sure that he can,” Miranda said, setting the jar back on the dresser. She would have it open again after dinner; James might protest, but he would not win the day. “He hasn’t the imagination.”

James was startled into laughter, and the expression he directed her way was so full of fondness that Miranda considered she was forgiven for her manipulation of him in company – or perhaps it said that she did not need to be forgiven at all. “I’ll read Bunyan ten times over before I touch any book Peter thinks I ought to be reading,” he said, quite serious even with the lingering grin on his face. “Read me Calderón de la Barca if you would like to; I won’t be reading it myself.”

“You will become exceptionally bored with only Bunyan for company,” Miranda predicted. “Within three days you will have changed your mind.”

“Teach me to embroider, then,” he said. “That way I will be able to keep proper company with the ladies.”

This time it was Miranda’s turn to laugh. “Can you imagine Mrs Griffiths attempting to compose her report of such a thing to Peter?”

James did not laugh. “I would be very interested to hear her report of this afternoon.”

“How do you think it went?”

He walked over to the bed, and Miranda followed him. Together they moved the clothing into the dresser, James folding rather more neatly than Miranda, and then sat down side by side among the pillows. “I do not know that you should have brought me into it,” James said seriously. “Abigail already likes you a great deal. There is no need to risk that in an attempt to change her mind about me.”

“She does like you,” Miranda said. “She is –”

“No, she doesn’t,” James said. “She knows I am Flint, and whatever else she might think, she will not forget that. I am not somebody she is safe to like.”

“I know you are Flint, and I like you.”

James gave her half a smile and shook his head. “Hardly the same.”

“She has encountered men far worse than you in her time at sea.”

“She is grateful that I have treated her well by comparison to those other men,” James said. “It is not the same thing as a genuine affection, and it can easily be displaced by tales of how I have treated others.”

“There is another tale she could be told that might prove decisive in her estimation of you.”

James looked at her, his face still and his eyes wary. “You do not suggest –”

“You will need to practise, you know, if you are to present yourself before parliament.”

“I thought we agreed that was no longer in the realm of possibility.”

“And I thought we agreed we would play these things all the way to the end.”

“You think to turn Abigail against Peter by telling her all he has done,” James said. “If his sins will not be made known to the wider world, at least they will be known to his daughter, who will never look at him the same way again.”

Miranda did not deny it. There was no need to pretend a moral motive, not here with James.

“You assume she will not think less of me when she has learned the full truth,” he said. “I understand that you think highly of her, and so do I, but I do not think that is an assumption that can safely be made.”

“If she heard it from another, I might agree with you,” Miranda said. “But nobody with any heart at all could hear the tale from your own mouth and –”

“I do not say she would condemn me wholly,” James said huskily. “I do not say she would not feel compassion or sympathy for me. I say she will think less of me.”

“Why?”

James sat for a moment with his lips pressed tightly together and frustration around his eyes. “You saw how she looked at Billy,” he said eventually.

The memory of it brought a smile to Miranda’s face. “Yes, I did,” she said. “Can you blame her?”

James managed to contain most of his smile but not all of it. He was far more subtle about it than Abigail, but Miranda had certainly seen him looking Billy’s way on more than one occasion. “I cannot blame her,” he admitted.

“How can there be so very much of him?”

James shrugged. “I find it best not to question providence.”

“And he does not even realise it,” Miranda said. “How can a man like that not realise what he looks like?”

A flicker of a frown crossed James’s face, and Miranda remembered the concerted effort it had taken, between herself and Thomas, to convince James of certain things about himself.

“But you were speaking of Abigail,” she said to save him the consideration of it. “What does her eminently reasonable reaction to Billy have to do with any of it?”

“She has not lived in the world as you and I have,” James said, appearing grateful for the turn in the conversation. “She has no experience of … in matters of love. You know something of how girls of her status are raised and how they are educated. You have seen how seriously she takes matters of right and wrong and how clearly they are separated for her.”

“I do not believe her mind is closed.”

James grimaced. “You and Thomas were married,” he said, “and I – was involved with you both. You see, don’t you, that to a girl of Abigail’s background, an idealistic young girl, sheltered as she is, my intrusion into your noble marriage is utterly unconscionable? You see that nothing more than that needs to be said when it comes to the source of its undoing?”

“No,” Miranda said, taking his hand. “No, of course not.”

“She is not you, Miranda,” James said, wrapping his fingers around hers. “She will not see things in the same way. To tell her the whole of it might well destroy her good opinion of us both. Why risk it, when she is already inclined to like and trust you?”

He was right. He was right and he was wrong, and there was no way to test how much he was either without risking the consequence he spoke of. Abigail would not know the sort of reputation Miranda had had among adults in London or how she was seen by the residents of New Providence Island. Here, for the first time in at least fifteen years and likely more, Miranda was beginning with a favourable impression. It felt very odd indeed to be in possession of a reputation that could be protected and not one that must perpetually be overcome.

“You seek to protect my reputation,” she said to James, still wondering at the absurdity of it. “I wonder if you are any better at it now than the first time you tried.”

“Now, that’s not fair,” he said. “You were actively conspiring against me.”

She leaned over and kissed him, propelled by an impulse that could not be resisted.

“Yes,” James said. “Just like that.”

Miranda leaned into him and felt his laughter shake his chest. He put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her a little closer against him.

“Who knows what Peter might tell her,” Miranda said, trying to rest her head on James’s shoulder but finding the angle of it less than accommodating. “Who knows what he might already have told her. Is it not best that we speak for ourselves in this matter? Should we not seek to tell our own story before it is taken from us?”

“I think he would hesitate to tell Abigail anything about it at all,” James said. “They are not close, and he knows she has previously spoken for us. I think he will be very careful, and very close-mouthed, and very much the coward.”

“So we will be free to form her first impression of the matter.”

James’s arm tensed around her marginally, and when Miranda raised her head to look at him she saw tension all through his jaw and cheek.

“I would prefer not to cede such a thing to Peter,” she said. “Wouldn’t you?”

“I have never told the story to anybody,” James said, now fiddling with the thumbnail of his free hand. “Part of me thinks I should not prepare or practise at all, should not even think of it, so that any performance I must give to Whitehall will be as earnest as possible. If such a performance is intended to unmask Flint and show England –” he grimaced “– a flawed man, then there should be no sophistication to it, no rehearsed lines. If I am to expose myself, I wish to do it once and once only and have that time count for everything.”

Miranda was not willing to push him any further on that point. She still could not quite believe that James had agreed to Peter’s suggestion in the first place, that he had shaken his hand and pledged to so abase himself. Miranda would quite honestly rather see New Providence Island sink to the bottom of the ocean than have James subject himself to such a thing, but it was his choice to make, and so he would be the one to make it, if the time came. “I will be able to speak with Abigail far more discreetly than you,” she said instead. “What if I were to raise the matter with her?”

“You do as you think is wisest,” James said. “Only take care not to let your animosity toward Peter play too large a role in your decision.”

Miranda did not concern herself with the vast hypocrisy of those words, not when it was a hypocrisy they shared. Miranda was certainly not willing to give up her own, so she would not protest his. “Too large a role?” she said instead.

James gave her a small, knowing smile. “I would be disappointed if it were to play no role at all.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks very much to everybody who has read, left kudos and commented so far, and a happy new year to all!

The following afternoon, Miranda accepted the offer of a length of linen to work on as she pleased but said she would rather sit by the window, where the light was best. Mrs Griffiths looked at her askance and Abigail looked down in disappointment, but neither said a word against Miranda taking a chair and setting it by the nearest window. From here, she could easily see James sitting and reading by the writing desk; from the sofa, she could not. The light was indeed much better, with Miranda turned sideways to the window so sunlight could fall directly onto her work. Mrs Griffiths could not watch Miranda without turning her head and revealing to everyone in the room that she was doing so. Miranda could look out over the lawn whenever she chose, watching the grass ripple while, at a greater distance, trees swayed gently in the wind.

Here she could sit quite undisturbed and reflect on how long it had been since she had engaged in such a task, trying to bring to mind the lessons of her girlhood. Perhaps she could attempt to replicate the sampler she had made at twelve years of age that had caused an almighty stir the moment somebody had finally looked at it closely, several days after it had been completed. Her aunt and uncle Farrell had been visiting that spring, and blame had been pointed in every direction as to who could have taught Miranda such a thing. It had been a very instructive episode, even if the conflict between various relations had grown a little tiresome after the first week. Miranda had unpicked a great many stitches in the few days following the discovery, and the same smile she had worn then found its way to her lips now. 

Miranda had considered herself quite a prodigy when it came to embroidery, but as her artistic endeavours had not been looked upon favourably, she had not minded in the least when her education began to focus much more heavily on music and language. She had kept her hand in at needlework, as could not be avoided for a girl of her age and station, but her heart had not been in it any longer, and she had given it up as soon as she had been able. It had been thirty years since she had produced her unappreciated masterpiece and at least twenty since she had embroidered anything at all. Perhaps she ought to have asked Mrs Griffiths if there were socks to darn or any damaged clothing that required repair; these were the skills she had mastered over the last decade of her life.

How that girl would have laughed to learn that living a life of sin with a pirate captain would involve his teaching her the very meanest of servants’ work so that she might be able to survive without his assistance when he took to the sea. Their food and drink must be planned for, procured and prepared; the house they lived in must be cleaned and maintained; the sturdy clothes they wore must be washed, reinforced and mended; anywhere she wished to go, she must take herself. If anything was broken, it must be repaired or replaced, or Miranda must learn to do without it. She had longed for self-reliance as a girl and as a young woman, and she had not had the faintest idea of the amount of work such a thing necessarily entailed. James had not held any of Miranda’s ignorance against her; he had simply instructed her where she needed instructing and assisted her where she needed assisting. When he was away, she managed as best she could, and once she could manage, he had stepped away and left her to run the house exactly as she liked, plainly weary of the task and preferring to grant Miranda a domain over which she could have complete control. That twelve-year-old girl would have hated him for it; at thirty-two, Miranda had come to know a great deal more about both men and compromise, and she had not complained. James was the one who brought money into their home. James had had a great many other things on his mind.

And so he did now. He was not so much reading as attempting to read, still puzzling over the withdrawal of his men and his ship, as he had been all morning. Beneath that, of course, was something far more disturbing, far more agitating, which the disappearance of a ship went some way to distracting him from but which Miranda could see on him in those moments he looked sharply away from his book and out the window, when he looked in Miranda’s direction but never directly at her, when his hand rose to his mouth and his fingers worked compulsively through the hair at his chin for some time before he caught himself and returned his eyes to the page. 

A skeleton, Miranda thought, with a sword in one hand and an hourglass in the other. She had not seen James’s banner a great many times, but she had seen it enough to be able to bring it to mind, and perhaps enough to reproduce it fairly faithfully now. She had been provided with a good amount of fabric, roughly two feet square, and if she were to do it as blackwork – a dark skeleton against a pale background, the exact opposite of a pirate’s black – she could be provided with an abundance of black thread and then left entirely to her own devices. 

Then again, she could do it in colours, if she liked. She could have it smile, laugh, weep. She could lower the sword, have it thrown to the ground and the hourglass held close to the skull, a tear running down from one eye socket. James would not be pleased by it; Mrs Griffiths would be appalled; Abigail may be distressed. The governor of Carolina would no doubt be as appalled by it as Miranda’s governess had been by her sampler all those years ago. Miranda could see it before her now in bold blackwork – perhaps a teardrop in blue, or the same pale colour as the background – and was not one of the noblest goals of art to present the truth in a way that might well be abhorrent to the beholder but could not be denied by any who saw it?

She would begin with a border, to test her recall of the method and allow her fingers a chance to remember what they had once known so well. If she was asked to share her intended design, she could say she had not yet decided on one; it would be best not to begin on anything controversial quite yet, especially if Mrs Griffiths intended to take custody of it when Miranda was not in this room.

Miranda had pricked herself three times and had little to show for it when Abigail came over to sit at the window with her. Abigail did not say a word to Mrs Griffiths when she gathered her work and stood, nor to Miranda when she set her chair down on the opposite side of the window and settled herself there. Her work was smaller and much finer than Miranda’s; she had a pair of oak leaves in three different shades of green and was working in brown on what would presumably be an acorn underneath them. Abigail did not share Miranda’s fumbling; she worked with steady confidence, looking quite pale but focused completely on the work of her hands. It was the same look she had worn when writing in James’s cabin; if she concentrated hard enough on what she was doing, the rest of the world went away.

Miranda had been comfortable in silence when sitting alone and watching James, but she did not like it now that Abigail had come. She did not like to see all three of them sat in a straight line along one wall, each looking down and thinking their own dark thoughts and unable to speak any of them aloud. 

“It has been a very long time since I have done this,” she confessed to Abigail. “I have quite lost the knack.”

Abigail glanced up at her, startled. 

“Oh, I remember how to do it,” Miranda said with a smile. “My mind tells me it is easy, but my fingers simply do not agree.”

Abigail edged forward a little on her seat. “What is your design?”

“I think I will have to be rather less ambitious than I had originally planned,” Miranda said. “Can you advise me?”

Abigail looked quietly delighted to be asked, and Miranda found the conversation that ensued remarkably soothing. They discussed design and technique and how best Miranda might make use of the materials at her disposal given her uncertain skill level, their heads bent together in the warmth of the sun, and Miranda was struck again by how serious a girl Abigail was, how carefully she considered each detail, each triviality, in what was such a minor endeavour. She was wholehearted still despite the horrors she had experienced; she only needed somewhere that heart could be kept safe while it grew back into its full strength. 

When the first note was played on the harpsichord, both of them startled a little, sitting back upright in their seats and turning to look into the middle of the room. James was sitting at the instrument, looking not at Miranda or Abigail but at Mrs Griffiths, an apologetic little smile on his face. “You don’t mind?” he said.

Mrs Griffiths was taken aback to be so directly addressed by him, but in the end she only nodded and lowered her eyes again, frowning a little. James still did not look to the window but picked out the same slow scale as he had played yesterday, first with his right hand and then his left, and then painstakingly with both at the same time. He played loudly and without finesse, and Miranda fancied she knew exactly what he was about.

Abigail did not know what he was about at all; the look she directed at him and then at Miranda was perplexed, and she hunched her shoulders a little against the strident and untutored nature of the playing. But Miranda engaged her in conversation again and she soon became accustomed to the noise, even when James tired of that scale and began to explore others. He did not know them either by memory or by theory; he discovered them slowly by ear, his false notes coming as often as the true ones. There was a touch of self-consciousness about him, as there always was when he applied himself to a thing he did not know, but given his playing was directed to a practical purpose and did not aspire to anything approaching proficiency, Miranda suspected he might be quite enjoying himself.

She turned the conversation. 

“I imagine you have a great many questions about how this has all come to pass,” she said to Abigail, adjusting her square of linen so that it did not lie too taut or too loose where she worked on it. “If you would like to know the whole truth of the situation, you only need ask. You are, of course, under no obligation to do so. I offer only because I think you are entitled to the truth, should you want it.”

Abigail’s hands had gone still as Miranda spoke, but she resumed her stitching immediately and made several careful passes with the needle before she brought herself to answer. “I think it is always best to know the truth.”

“It is a difficult story, and parts of it will pain you to hear.”

“Pain me?” Abigail said, her hand stilling again as her eyes rose to meet Miranda’s. “How?”

James had reached F major, and he was fumbling persistently over the fingering. Miranda had taught him this once, years ago, and it was singular enough that she did not think it likely he would have forgotten the trick of it. F, G, A, he played with thumb and two fingers, and then B flat awkwardly with his thumb again, before pausing and starting again from F. He played it with the left hand smoothly enough and then attempted his right again, his face a picture of innocent concentration.

“The part my father played in it,” Abigail said quietly, beginning to tie off her acorn. “That is what you refer to.”

Miranda looked from James back to Abigail and nodded in confirmation. She continued with the rough zig-zag of her border and did not speak again until Abigail was beginning on her second acorn. “It is a difficult story, as I have said. But if you know it, everything that has happened here will be much clearer to you.”

Abigail’s expression was one of fixed concentration as she continued to work, but there was a trace of nervousness in her hands. She kept her eyes down. “I do not know that I – I think my father would not like me to hear of such things.”

“That is quite possible.”

“I think there is a great deal he does not tell me. I have not seen him for such a long time, and he does not seem – he wrote to me regularly, and I to him, but they were only letters. He has not seen me since I was very small. We do not know how to talk to one another.”

“I am sure an understanding will develop between you,” Miranda said. “As long as you are patient with each other and you both are committed to building intimacy, it will come in time.” Miranda did not miss the flicker of doubt on Abigail’s face when she had mentioned a mutual commitment; she noted it and took it as a positive sign for the endeavour she was embarking upon. “The circumstances of your reunion are exceptionally difficult, but you are father and daughter, after all.” 

“But you offer to speak of it now,” Abigail said. “You will explain everything to me?”

“If that is what you wish, then yes, I will.”

Abigail glanced up at James, who had still not solved the puzzle that was the right-handed F major scale. She picked up her needle to continue with her acorn but then lowered it again, staring at her fingers uncertainly.

Mrs Griffiths’s patience had expired; she put her embroidery to one side, stood up and approached James, who sat back and received her calmly.

“The fourth finger,” she said. “You use your fourth finger on the way up and the way down.”

“The fourth finger,” he said. “Like so?”

“I would like to know the truth,” Abigail said as James dutifully used his fourth finger on the way up and then on the way back down again.

“Yes,” Mrs Griffiths said. “Now please, for the love of God, move on.”

“My apologies,” James said. “I was not aware that the technique could be varied.”

Mrs Griffiths returned to her chair in a huff and gathered her work back into her lap. When she looked across to Miranda and Abigail, she could see that Miranda was speaking, but James was hard at work on the next scale already, and Miranda’s posture gave away no hint of the subject matter that Mrs Griffiths could not hear. Abigail was listening quite calmly and her hands were steady, and there was nothing different in that than there had been before.

“I first met Thomas Hamilton when I was twenty-four years old and he a little younger,” Miranda said, working her stitches slowly. “He was a novel thinker, something of a firebrand, and quite famously resistant to the attentions of any young lady who attempted to pursue him. His reputation made me curious; I wanted very much to meet him and was determined to make an impression when I did. We did not move in quite the same circles, but they were not entirely disparate, and eventually I received an invitation to a gathering at the house of a young man I knew to be acquainted with him. We were introduced, but no sooner had we been so than Thomas was prevailed upon to speak to the room. It was really quite an extraordinary thing. There were more than twenty guests in attendance, rich young men and attractive young ladies, all holding the very highest opinions of themselves, and everyone wanted to listen to Thomas.”

Abigail had finished the second acorn as Miranda spoke; she broke off the thread and began on another. “What did he speak of?”

“Oh, all manner of things,” Miranda said. “Philosophy, art, religion. It was all one to him, you see. He thought the world should be beautiful, fair and good, and there was no topic too small to be included in that mission. In all my time, I have never met an idealist who could hold a candle to Thomas.”

Abigail hung on Miranda’s every word, a warm light in her eyes and the touch of a smile on her lips. She was so easily captivated, so drawn into the beautiful beginning of a story though she knew it must end unhappily. For a moment, Miranda regretted having embarked on the scheme at all. Abigail leaving Mrs Griffiths to come and sit by Miranda had been both a demonstration and a declaration of trust, and Miranda rewarded her for it by introducing even more darkness into her life, this sweet young woman who had already seen far more of it than she ought.

“And you spoke to him?” Abigail asked a little haltingly, as though it had occurred to her that it might not be her place to be asking so many questions but she could not resist it all the same.

“I did,” Miranda said. It would be even crueller to withhold the story from Abigail now that she had promised it, and so she must continue along the path she had committed herself to. “After dinner there were parlour games, and Thomas was not inclined to play them. I was otherwise engaged and did not notice when he excused himself from the room, but when I noticed his absence I went looking to see if I could find him. He was in the library, quite exhausted and plainly not expecting anyone to have followed him. I learned later that it was customary for him to escape so after dinner and that there was a tacit understanding that he would be left alone, but nobody had informed me of it. He was quite gracious in receiving me, surprised as he was, and insisted I stay and speak with him a while.”

James, having made his way through all the major scales, began on the minor. He seemed to remember that one of them was comprised of all naturals, but it took him a few tries to discover which one that was.

Miranda did not stop to listen. Mrs Griffiths surely could not stand the noise James was making for much longer, and even if she could, there was no way to know when she might start to grow suspicious of Abigail and Miranda’s private conversation by the window. There was no time to waste admiring the performance. 

“I asked Thomas of all the books in that room, how many he thought had been written by a woman,” she said. “He said he had seen Madame d’Aulnoy and the Countess of Pembroke on the shelves but was not familiar with the contents of this particular library and had not made an exhaustive survey. He asked me if I was a writer of some form, a diarist or a playwright or a poet. Unlike some, he did not ask to tease but out of genuine interest. He seemed quite disappointed to hear that I was not and suggested I turn my hand to something of the kind to see how I might like it.”

Mrs Griffiths approached James again and began to direct him; her voice was loud enough to carry over the notes he played, and Abigail looked up in some consternation, first at her chaperone and then at James, as though she had forgotten either of them were there at all, despite the din James had been making. 

“It is all right,” Miranda said to her. “James has given me his blessing to share this with you. He thinks, as I do, that you are entitled to the truth of it.”

“He is providing us with privacy,” Abigail realised aloud, staring at him in no small surprise.

“He is,” Miranda said. 

“It sounds quite awful.”

Miranda smiled at her. “It does.”

Abigail smiled as well, but the smile slowly faded as she looked back down at her hands. “Your husband sounds quite lovely,” she said. “I should like to meet a man like that.”

“He was quite lovely,” Miranda said, “and quite shockingly argumentative. Such a debate we had about the Oresteia that day.”

“The Oresteia?”

“A series of tragedies by Aeschylus,” Miranda said. “Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, both wronged by Agamemnon, kill him and his lover Cassandra. Clytemnestra and Agamemnon’s son Orestes kills Clytemnestra and Aegisthus in revenge for his father’s death, and he is then pursued and tormented by the Furies for having done so. He is only saved by the intervention of Athena, who puts him on trial and casts the deciding vote for mercy in his favour, decreeing that from that moment forward justice would be delivered in such a way, trial by jury, rather than by personal vendetta.”

Abigail looked more than a little horrified. “And you argued with Thom – with Lord Hamilton about such things on the first day you met? That was your very first conversation?”

“It seemed the most natural thing at the time,” Miranda said. “He is remarkably easy to talk to.”

Abigail’s expression softened. “So are you,” she said shyly.

Miranda could only smile at her again. “I thank you for saying so.”

“It is the truth,” Abigail said intently. “I feel I can talk to you more easily than any other person here. I feel – I feel as though you more than any other have my best interests at heart.”

“I am sure your father –”

“My father does not know me,” Abigail said, far less careful with her words than she had been earlier. “He is very busy, but I feel he seeks to protect me and not to take care of me. He has not asked me what I need.” There were tears brimming in her eyes, and Miranda reached out to press down lightly on her hand for a moment. “I am tired,” Abigail confessed quietly as Miranda took her hand away again. “I am … I have been so tired.”

“We can resume this conversation later, if you would like.”

“No, thank you,” Abigail said, resuming her embroidery. Not one tear had spilled from her eyes. “Please continue.”

“Very well,” Miranda said, thinking back to the memory she had held in her mind a moment before. “After a time, we were looked for and found, and much was made of our supposed tryst in the library and the familiarity with which we had addressed each other. We must have been acquainted previously, they decided, and kept it a secret from everybody all this time. Thomas did not seem upset by the supposition, and I was not at all so, and from the next day we struck up a sort of correspondence. He wrote to me as though we had indeed long been acquainted with each other – nothing improper, but familiar and lively and in the most extraordinary style. I had never particularly liked letter-writing, thinking it rather a poor substitute for proper conversation, but Thomas was a master of the form, and I strove first to match and then to outdo him. I found myself invited to many more events of the kind, and though Thomas was much in demand, he sought me out where he could. We became fast friends, and very soon I began to feel that he had become indispensable in my life in the most unexpected of ways.”

“Fast friends,” Abigail echoed. “You were not in love with him?”

“I loved him very much,” Miranda said, feeling her heart tighten and twist. She stilled her hands for a moment, lest she prick herself again. “There was no one I loved more and no one I felt I understood better. People believed we were courting, and perhaps we were, in our way, but it was nothing at all like love as I had been taught to seek it. It was comfortable. It was natural. I felt I had known him all my life.”

She looked up to check on Abigail and saw a tear trail from her cheek down to her jaw, where it fell and landed on her leftmost leaf. Her expression remained placid, but Miranda saw that it was taking some effort to make it so. James was halfway to inventing the arpeggio; Mrs Griffiths, who had resumed her seat, was halfway to launching her embroidery across the room at him in sheer exasperation. Miranda took a moment to steady herself and then resumed both her stitching and the story she was telling.

“Here is where I tell you something that I hold very close to my heart,” she said to Abigail. “Here I tell you something I do not think your father would wish you to know. If you do not want me to tell you, I will not. If you need some time to consider your choice, I will give it to you.”

“Tell me, please,” Abigail breathed. Then she caught herself, blinking away her tears and composing herself. “I mean, if you – if you would like to. If you would not mind.”

Miranda looked at the terribly misshapen border she had stitched along nearly all of one side. Thomas would have loved it and insisted Miranda make no attempt to repair it nor to start over. He would have taken it and treasured it. _Anyone can embroider in perfectly straight lines,_ he would pronounce dismissively, having never once in his life so much as touched a needle or thread. _I have seen countless of them, and they do not draw my eye. But this … this holds secrets. It holds life. Your mind was elsewhere, and your hands wandered, and so the –_

“Lady Hamilton?” Abigail said anxiously. “Lady Hamilton, are you –”

“Thomas’s first love was a man named John Talbot,” Miranda said, and Abigail froze for a moment with her mouth open and her eyes very wide. “It was an unrequited love, but it left a very deep impression on him. John left for the New World not long after I met Thomas – I saw him a few times and spoke to him only once – but it was some months before Thomas disclosed to me the truth of what he had felt.”

Abigail’s eyes flickered across to James then, her face having returned to her previous studied calm. She was a clever girl and a good girl, and Peter did not deserve her. Miranda did not deserve her.

“Thomas and I talked a great deal about what we wanted from life,” Miranda said, trying to bring some cheer to her expression, even if she could not quite bring any into her voice. “We both wanted freedom in our own way, and we agreed upon a means that we both might have it.”

“You married –”

“We married so that we might remain friends without scandal,” Miranda said. “We married so that Thomas could be true to himself without having to deceive or disappoint his wife. We married so that I could be free to seek joy and pleasure and live the fullness of life, protected by my husband’s status and his wealth and the love that he held for me. That is why we married, and it should not have had to be a secret, but it was.”

“And you were happy?” Abigail said.

“We were.” 

“You did not want a real husband?”

“I had a real husband,” Miranda said, her voice sharp despite the great effort she made to soften it. “Thomas was my husband, and I loved him dearly.”

“I am sorry,” Abigail said, contrite. “I am trying to understand.”

“Yes,” Miranda said. “I know.”

The perfect silence that followed those words stretched across the entire room, washing over Miranda in a way that made her slightly dizzy, so accustomed had she become to James’s racket completely filling the air around her.

It was broken not by Miranda nor Abigail but by James fumbling for the melody Miranda had played with him yesterday, striking the keys with much-reduced vigour and a great deal more attention. It took him a few false starts and curses that could only be discerned by someone who knew him well enough to read them on his lips, but the song took shape slowly under his hands. There was feeling enough in him for music; if the circumstances of his birth had been different, Miranda was sure he would have played decently, and possibly quite well. He would have learned, too, how to properly use the singing voice he had been given, which was remarkably pleasant even rough and unschooled as it was. 

He really could have been anything.

“Did my father know that – the nature of your – I mean, did he –”

“He knew Thomas well,” Miranda said, keeping her voice gentle as James hit a false note, frowned and began again. “I believe he had known of Thomas’s disposition for quite some years.”

“All I ever knew was that Lord Hamilton had died and you had had to go away,” Abigail said, tears welling in her eyes again. “No one spoke about it. I did not know my father had anything to do with it. Please, tell me what he –”

Mrs Griffiths stood up abruptly and walked not toward James but toward Miranda and Abigail at the window. James’s eyes followed her, but he continued to play. “Excuse me,” she said shortly. “Is everything –”

“I am tired,” Abigail snapped as she turned to look at Mrs Griffiths, her voice high and strained and a tear rolling down each cheek. “I am tired, and I wish to speak with Lady Hamilton.”

“Your father said –”

“My father can speak to me himself, if he wishes,” Abigail said with her chin in the air. 

This would most certainly be the end of it for the time being. The colder part of Miranda saw the strategic benefit in Abigail being deprived of the information she wanted by the intervention of her father’s employee, but that part of her that still felt love and warmth and kindness was furious on her behalf. Abigail had been locked away for far too long already: at school in London, captive on the _Good Fortune_ and the _Fancy_ , in the cells under the fort and then on James’s own ship. She plainly resented Mrs Griffiths’s presence, though she had borne it without complaint up to this moment. She did not need to be suffocated in this way. She needed to grow. She needed to feel free.

Miranda also saw the thoughts whirling through Abigail’s head and the exhaustion she strained to keep at bay. The full story would be too much to tell her all at once, even if Mrs Griffiths had not stepped in. Indeed, they had gone further than Miranda had thought likely on a first attempt – James had seen to that – but the same tactic would not work again, and so the next step must be considered carefully. Abigail needed time, and Miranda needed time, and at the moment there was no shortage of it.

“Abigail, perhaps you would like to take some air with Mrs Griffiths,” Miranda said. “It does nobody any good to be stuck inside for so long.”

“You are stuck inside,” Abigail said with childish defiance.

“I am,” Miranda said. “But I have James for company, if you would like to go out. I think he could use my help.”

Abigail did not look at James but out into the garden, her eyes red and tired.

“Go on,” Miranda said. “Move about a little. Take in some sunshine. It is not all doom and gloom in the world.”

Abigail stood and set her embroidery down on the seat: two oak leaves, three acorns and a thin green line whose future Miranda could not yet determine. “Thank you for taking the time to speak with me, Lady Hamilton,” Abigail said. 

“Mrs Hamilton, isn’t it?” Mrs Griffiths said. There was real animosity in her tone now that she suspected she had been duped; Miranda only smiled at her and rose to accept Abigail’s thanks.

James stood, too, as the ladies left the room, sitting down again when they were replaced by a quiet man just inside the door. Miranda set aside the embroidery that only Thomas could love and moved her chair to sit by James, who had his fingers on the keys again but did not play. He did not look up when Miranda placed her chair beside him, nor when she sat down in it. He looked nearly as exhausted as Abigail. 

“You did very well,” Miranda said to him.

“I gave myself a fucking awful headache.”

“You gave us all a headache, my dear,” Miranda said with a small smile, thinking of Abigail’s suppressed winces and grimaces. “That was truly atrocious.”

“Well, thank you.”

Miranda took his hand in hers and they sat quietly together.

“For a girl twice kidnapped by pirates and held prisoner for such a long time, she is doing remarkably well,” James said after a while. “It is good that she has you to talk to.”

“Peter should be looking after her better,” Miranda said, fiercely angry with Peter, as had now become her perpetual state. “If he does not know how to help her, he ought to find someone who does.”

“He is allowing her to spend time with you,” James said. “Could he do any better?”

“Well, thank you,” Miranda said, the words coming out dry even though she was quite genuinely flattered. 

James rubbed his forehead with his free hand, squeezing his eyes tightly closed. “Will they be coming back?”

“I very much doubt it.”

He nodded, opened his eyes and closed the instrument. “I should like to go upstairs and lie down.”

“You poor thing,” Miranda said, sugary sweet. “Do you need a tonic?” 

He shot her a narrow-eyed glare.

“Come along, then,” she said, pulling on his hand to ensure he stood when she did. “Lay your head down a while.”

The man at the door took them upstairs without saying a word, closing the door to their room and then withdrawing to the top of the stairs. 

The moment he was gone, James turned to Miranda. “How did it go?” he asked with quiet intent. “What did you tell her?”

Miranda went to the bed and lay down on it fully-clothed, the pillow sweet and cool against her cheek. “I told her the nature of my relationship with Thomas,” she said. 

James had followed her to the bed but remained standing near the foot of it, frowning down at her. “That’s all?” He winced as he heard himself, shook his head and sat on the bed to take off his boots. “I don’t mean to diminish – I only mean that opportunities to speak with her alone will be scarce indeed after this. There is so much more to be told.”

“I know,” Miranda said. “But if she is to follow us all the way through it, it must be told properly.”

James’s expression was wary for a moment – defensive, though he had nothing to defend himself against – before it cleared and he tucked his boots under the bed. “She took it well, then?”

“I believe she is quite in love with him herself.”

James swung himself over to lie beside her, his brow wrinkled and his expression strained. “You don’t believe that he is still –”

“No,” Miranda said. “I do not.”

“It cannot be easy to speak of it.”

 _Abigail made it easy_ , Miranda could have said. _It is a relief to tell it after holding it inside for so long_ , she could have said. _It is a comfort to me to remember him as he was_ , she could have said. _It simply had to be done_ , she could have said.

“No,” she said, her throat tightening around the word as she said it. Her eyes prickled, and her face grew hot. James drew her to him and she buried her face against his chest, letting the tears finally flow as he wrapped both arms around her, holding her tight and close as she wept.


	5. Chapter 5

Abigail was said to be too unwell to come to dinner that night and too unwell to leave her room at all the following day. It might have been the truth, or something close to it, but far more likely was that Mrs Griffiths had made a highly unfavourable report to Peter and this was its consequence. Miranda and James had proved they could not be trusted in Abigail’s company, and so they were to be separated, however unhappy it might make her.

Miranda had thought her life dull and joyless on New Providence Island, but it was nothing to the misery of Charles Town. It was said that Governor Ashe had turned around a struggling colony and made a rousing success of it, but everything Miranda had seen suggested that Richard Guthrie had it right: Charles Town was not a civilised place but a cold and brutal one. Abigail would be better protected and better looked after in wild and lawless Nassau, making her home with Mrs Barlow and the dread Captain Flint, than coming to live here, where nobody so much as smiled, let alone laughed, where faces were unfailingly grim and a sense of danger and despair pervaded all. Miranda did not feel sorry at all for Peter; he had made this place what it was. She did not feel sorry for his men; she had seen them at work. She felt sorry for all the poor souls who had no choice but to make their lives in such a thoroughly unpleasant place, and she felt desperately sorry for Abigail, who had escaped a living nightmare and now must recover from it here.

There were only five members of Peter’s staff that Miranda and James were permitted to interact with, and by the end of the third day Miranda knew them all by name: Messrs Dickens, Tullett and Terris, who carried guns and swords and shadowed them with varying degrees of professional detachment; Miss Martin, who waited on them in their room with a ghostly, timid presence; and Mrs Griffiths, who now treated them with such barely-concealed resentment and disdain that Miranda could almost think her mother-in-law had risen from the grave. 

Of the men, Miranda liked Dickens the most. He was the oldest of the three, his beard run through with grey, and he carried himself with a sort of gravitas that the majority of the militia were sorely lacking in. It was he who had come to relieve their guard of his duties on that first day, and though that posting had been as a result of Abigail’s complaint and under Peter’s orders, Miranda felt a small amount of gratitude toward Dickens all the same. She did not consider that he was well-disposed to her or to James, but he did not seem the sort of man to do anything out of the common way without devoting a great deal of thought to it first, and so in that respect Miranda considered he could be trusted. 

Tullett, on the other hand, she did not trust in the least; she did not like the shadowed look in his eyes, his whisper-soft voice or the way his mouth would sometimes move when he was watching them. Miranda was certain that he would not shoot her, but that did little to put her mind at ease. Tullett did not pay much mind to the weapons he carried and had little physical presence to speak of, but he was the type of man who stood in shadows and thought quietly, who knew which boundaries he may and may not cross and who lingered right at the edge of that which was forbidden to him. Outright violence was the least of Miranda’s concerns when it came to men like Tullett; she watched him, but not too closely, lest he take it amiss.

Miranda would have been surprised to learn that Mr Terris had more than three thoughts in a day; he was the largest of the men who watched them – nothing to Billy Bones, but who was? – and he seemingly understood his duty as walking where he was told to walk, standing where he was told to stand, saying what he was told to say and doing it all while being significantly taller than anybody else in the room and quite remarkably broad across the shoulders. Miranda did not have anything against stupid men, but she generally preferred them to be a great deal smaller than Terris and much less thoroughly armed. She could not trust that prudence or reason would stay his hand in a moment of crisis, so she put her faith instead in the slowness of his mind. It would have to do.

James had taken the measure of these three men in a matter of hours and paid them remarkably little attention thereafter. He was no stranger to the presence of armed men, and there was nothing out of the common way about any of those three, not when set against the multitude of sailors, soldiers and pirates that James had had dealings with in the past. He knew men steadier than Dickens, craftier than Tullett and stronger than Terris and considered even those men far beneath him. James had earned his arrogance over two long and storied careers; Miranda took what confidence she could from it, and she took care never to stray too far from his side.

Miss Martin, however, was quite a different matter. She was young, slight and anxious, and James did not at all know what to do with her. He was generally uneasy being waited on at all; being waited on by a girl not much past fifteen who was so terrified of him she could not speak in his presence perturbed him so greatly that sometimes he would wince at only the mention of her name.

In their other life, Miranda had teased him on countless occasions about his bashfulness and his odd displays of chivalry. _We are people, you know_ , she had said to him. _You do not have to apologise for merely existing alongside us._ James always conceded the point to her when she made it but did not make any alteration to his behaviour. Thomas had often come to James’s rescue when the conversation took this turn, which had puzzled Miranda exceedingly. In the usual course of events, Thomas liked to sit back and listen to their arguments unfold; he would look back and forth between them with quite excessive fondness, sometimes declining to enter the fray even when invited. Miranda did not know why this topic in particular merited his intervention, and even in private he would not disclose it to her, however she might entreat him. She had continued to press it with James from time to time, rather more mildly than she might otherwise prefer, but that inquiry had come to an end, along with every other one of Miranda’s entertainments, when Peter had betrayed them all.

Peter had witnessed such exchanges on more than one occasion, but even if he had not, he could not have failed to observe the awkward gallantry that came over James when he was forced to interact in any meaningful way with a woman on a footing he was not sure of. Peter did not know James very well, but he knew that James had been raised without a mother or grandmother, without sisters or aunts or cousins, and then gone straight into the Navy. Peter had attended the same salons as James and had sat with him in a great many meetings, and he was not half as stupid as Miranda liked to think him. This was a clever move on his part, as long as he was confident that James posed no real danger to the girl. Miss Martin’s visible terror of him unnerved James infinitely more than the armed men that followed him or the matronly presence of Mrs Griffiths. Perhaps Peter did not know just how badly it devastated James to see himself reflected in the eyes of innocents, but Miranda would wager he had some idea of it. 

All that being said, it was nothing Miranda could not handle. She was faultlessly kind to Miss Martin and did all she could to present James to her in the best possible light. She did not force any interaction between them, but she spoke to James affectionately in Miss Martin’s presence, requested his help on matters many men would consider beneath them and sometimes spoke of him to Miss Martin with that fond, exasperated tone many women took in female company when speaking of their husbands. It would take a little time, but Miranda was confident she would soon have the situation well in hand.

On the fourth day Abigail made an appearance at lunch again, with Mrs Griffiths sitting at her side and Mr Tullett standing guard at the door. Abigail professed herself to be feeling much better and to be of a mind to sit with Mr McGraw and Mrs Hamilton that afternoon, and so that is what they did. Abigail sat with Miranda at the same window as they had previously, and they spent the afternoon discussing art and music as they embroidered under the watchful eye of Mrs Griffiths. James spent the largest part of the afternoon sitting by the writing desk with the book Abigail had given him, with only a brief visit to the harpsichord to play through some scales again and to practise the single song he knew. 

Abigail took that opportunity to quietly inform Miranda that she feared any more secret conversations would mean an end to them being able to sit together in the afternoon at all; she suggested that Miranda might put the information in writing so that Abigail could read it in secret and then reduce it to ash. Miranda did not outright refuse the request, but there was no prospect at all of such a thing being done. Asking for writing materials was bound to raise suspicions, and anything Miranda committed to writing could so easily fall into the wrong hands. It was all very well to be suspected of attempting to exert some malign influence over Abigail in the presence of her chaperone; Miranda certainly did not intend to provide Peter with physical evidence of it, nor of the multiple hanging offences James had committed over the course of the story Miranda intended to tell. It was only the fourth day of the fourteen they must wait. Another opportunity to speak to Abigail in private would likely arise, and if none did, then one would simply have to be made, whether by Miranda or James or by Abigail herself. After only a few minutes at the instrument James returned to the desk and his book, and Miranda and Abigail spoke only of mundane matters for the remainder of the afternoon.

On the fifth day, James woke in tears. It had long been plain that he was barely sleeping; indeed, of the five mornings and the countless times Miranda had come awake in the middle of the night, this was only the third time that she had woken and found him asleep. She drew the curtains halfway and sat in the window for a while as he slumbered on, half-dozing herself in the warmth of the sun. His tears were imperceptible to her until he woke with a rough intake of breath and curled up where he lay, his chest shaking and his breathing hoarse and pained. Miranda went and sat with him on the bed, rubbed his back and spoke gently to him, but hers was not the comfort he craved, and she feared it did precious little to soothe him.

When he finally lay still and quiet, his face pressed into a pillow as he tried to gather himself together, Miranda went and poked her head out of the door, requesting breakfast be brought to their room some time later this morning rather than laid out downstairs. Mr Terris, who was stationed at the top of the stairs some twenty feet away from their door, said he would pass the request on. Miranda could only hope he would remember to do it and not muddle the message when he did.

She was sorely tempted to keep James in bed all day and do whatever it might take to see him sleep most of it away. He would not last a week this way, let alone any longer than that, and if he was not in a state to properly face whatever fate Peter had in mind for them, then that fate likely could not be resisted. Together, they could defy and outmanoeuvre Peter; Miranda did not think she could do it all on her own.

When she closed the door and turned back toward James, he was sitting up in bed and brushing hair out of his eyes, looking dreadfully pale and still a little muddled. “That is not necessary,” he said, looking from Miranda to the door. His eyes were painfully red, and his voice was little more than a rasp. 

“There are many things that are not necessary,” Miranda informed him. “They happen all the same.”

“It is just – what are you doing?”

“Closing the curtains.”

“Why?”

“If it is dark, you will find it easier to go back to sleep.”

“I am not going back to sleep.”

“No?”

He swung his legs out from under the covers and put his feet on the floor. “Miranda –”

“If you get out of that bed, I will tell Miss Martin you are severely ill and insist a doctor is called for.”

He did not move. “Miranda –”

“I have half a mind to do it anyway,” she said, walking over to him. “You are still bothered by … this one here.” She pressed gently on one of his bottom ribs, and a hiss of breath escaped him. “They ought to have been wrapped, I think, from the very beginning.”

“I can do that myself,” he said peevishly. “There is no need for a doctor.”

“He could give you something to help you sleep.”

James gave her a full-blooded glare at that. “If you dare –”

“I will not drug you,” she said, irritated by the imputation. “I am not – what was his name, the quartermaster of the _Intrepid_ when your –”

“Lucas,” James said. 

“I am not Mr Lucas.”

“And thank God for that.”

Miranda smiled at him, and he gave her a shadow of one in return. “If you insist on sitting up, I will take the opportunity to treat your bruises again,” she said. “There is enough salve for at least two more applications.”

“And if I stand, the doctor,” he said wearily.

“Quite.”

James slid himself under the covers again, leaning back into the pillow with the back of his hand over his eyes. Thomas had lain like that, too, when he was particularly vexed by his body’s need for sleep. James could not quite match Thomas’s flair, but then it was not a posture Miranda had ever seen Thomas strike while also recovering from a fit of tears. She wondered if it was a posture James had struck at all before his days sharing Thomas’s bed. She rather doubted that it was.

“There is no company to be kept until after lunch,” Miranda said, sitting down beside James and resting a hand on his knee. “Abigail has only ever been permitted to spend time with us in the afternoon, and I do not see that there is anyone else in this house worth speaking to this morning.”

“I am not much inclined to sleep.”

“You will frighten Abigail if you grow much more haggard than you already are.”

“Haggard, is it?” he said, lifting his hand from his face and peering down to where Miranda sat.

“Very much so.”

“Well, we can’t have that,” James mumbled, mostly to himself. “Nothing more terrifying to a girl who has survived being held prisoner by Captains Low and Vane than a prisoner of hers looking a little haggard.”

“Not frightened of you,” Miranda said, hitting the outside of his knee with the back of her hand. “Frightened for you.”

“Frightened … for me,” he repeated. 

“Yes.”

“What danger will she think I am in?”

“She asked me what part her father had played in our downfall, and that is where our conversation was interrupted,” Miranda said. “For two days now she has been left to reflect on that question while Peter has kept her from its answer. He has done as much as I have, if not more, in painting himself as the villain of the piece, and the more he appears to be so, the stronger the inclination to see you and I as –”

“The victims?”

“Yes.”

James’s mouth twitched in distaste, and he raised his hand to cover his eyes again.

“If you do not wish her to see you as such, I recommend you make a concerted effort to sleep through the morning so you are at least presentable when we sit with her this afternoon.” 

He held himself still and said nothing. 

“I will read to you, if it will help.” 

“Read what?”

“What would you like?” Miranda asked him, patting his leg and then going over to their small pile of books. “I am sure by now you are thoroughly sick of Bunyan.”

“Mmm.”

“A Cruising Voyage –”

“God, no. Once was more than enough.”

“You have already read it?”

“There is occasionally something useful to be found in such narratives,” James said a little defensively. “Rogers is a capable seaman, whatever else he might be, and I had time on my hands.”

“But you do not recommend it?”

James considered that for a moment. “There you have John Bunyan, Ibn Tufail, Calderón de la Barca and – who’s the –”

“Gottfried Leibniz.”

“Imagine you must choose a man from my crew to fight for your life. Do you choose Billy, Joji, Joshua, Dooley or Muldoon?”

“Which is Muldoon, again?”

“Yeah,” said James, taking his hand away from his eyes and letting his arm flop loosely down onto the bed beside him. “Exactly.”

“Leibniz, I think,” Miranda said, taking up the volume and returning to the bed. “He seems quite the driest of those that remain. It will do nicely.”

James snorted.

Miranda sat up among the pillows, the volume in her lap and James’s head heavy beside her left knee. It was really too dark to read comfortably, but she trusted she would not have to do so for long. “ _Essais de théodicée_ ,” she read in her most cultured French, “ _sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l’homme et l’origine du mal.”_

“Have I ever told you that –”

“I am well aware of your views of the French language, yes,” Miranda said, smoothing a hand over his forehead. “The sooner you are asleep, the less of it you will have to hear. _On a vu de tout temps que le commun des hommes a mis la dévotion dans les formalités: la solide piété, c’est-à-dire la lumière et la vertu_ , _n’a jamais été le partage du grand nombre_.”

James groaned and closed his eyes. Miranda smiled and read on.

When Miss Martin came to the door with breakfast, Miranda had long since put the book aside. She had not read two pages before James had dropped off to sleep, and she had lain down beside him instead, pleased when he shifted to accommodate her but did not wake. She had fallen at least partially asleep herself, waking with a start when the knock came on the door. 

Miss Martin came in and set a tray down on the chest by the foot of the bed, acknowledging Miranda with a little bob of the head and doing everything humanly possible to avoid looking at the man sleeping with her in the bed. Miranda had half a mind to say they would take lunch in the same way, in the hope that she might have James eat breakfast, sleep, eat lunch and then sleep away the rest of the afternoon, but the chances of that were not so high as to outweigh the continuing benefit of time spent with Abigail. Instead, she asked Miss Martin to come by half an hour before lunch so that they might have time to prepare before going downstairs. James slept all the way to that warning and all the way through it; Miranda woke him after Miss Martin had gone, with great reluctance and rather more difficulty than she had anticipated. But he woke, and he rose, and he made himself presentable, and then they went down to lunch.

The quiet in the drawing room after lunch was oppressive; Mrs Griffiths’s presence was conspicuous and unwelcome; James still seemed half-asleep and did not even pretend to read his book. At four o’clock, Abigail asked Mrs Griffiths rather desperately if she might take a short stroll in the garden with Mrs Hamilton. Mrs Griffiths said that the governor would not permit it and offered to accompany Abigail herself. Abigail firmly and politely declined the offer, and the rest of the afternoon passed in unhappy silence. Miranda concentrated on finishing the border of her work. The quality of each side was a marked improvement on the one that had come before it; it seemed such things were never truly forgotten, however long they might hide themselves away.

On the sixth day, Miranda woke in the early hours of the morning sticky with blood and could not muster the energy to do anything about it until James came awake some time later, dull and disoriented, and his movement roused her into full wakefulness. 

Over the years, James had learned what she needed at these times. When he was home for them, he treated her with quiet sympathy and obliged her in even her most petty demands. He was not dismissive; he was not squeamish. He had had no experience of it before Miranda, and that was perhaps why he took to it so easily. He had always trusted her to know what she wanted, and this was no different to anything else that she asked of him. He offered to call for Miss Martin now, but Miranda did not want Miss Martin. She did not want a servant or a slave or any doctor of Peter’s; she wanted peace and quiet, warm drinks and only James by her side. She wanted to be back at their home in Nassau, where she was mistress of her own house and could soothe herself as she pleased. She wanted any number of things she knew she could not have.

James fetched Miranda a towel and got back into bed with her without another word. When they were called on before breakfast, the necessary requests could be made. For now, Miranda would lie down with James and sleep through as much of it as possible. She arranged herself in the most comfortable fashion she could, James her pillow with one hand rubbing her lower back and the other splayed out between her shoulder blades. Miranda focused on those two hands, one perfectly still and one in steady, soothing motion, and when she woke there was a basket, towels and water at the foot of the bed and James was lying beside her, his expression peaceful as he watched her.

“Miss Martin and I have an agreement,” he said. “She will speak to you next time she comes by, and if she is satisfied you do not want her, she will leave you in my hands.”

“You spoke to her?”

“Is it so unthinkable that I did?”

“I only wish I had seen it.”

He rolled his eyes gently and raised himself onto one elbow. “If you had been awake to see it, it would not have been necessary. Do you want to wash?”

“No,” Miranda said. “I want to lie here for ever and ever and for it all to take care of itself.”

“We can try that,” James said agreeably, lying back down again. 

A few minutes passed in silence. Miranda wondered idly how long it would be until Miss Martin came to the room, but it took her a while to work up the energy to speak again. “What time is it?” she asked once she had done so.

“Ten.”

“When are you expecting Miss Martin?”

“I am to summon her as soon as you wake.”

She pondered that answer for a while, then turned to face him. “You seem quite derelict in your duty.”

He grinned at her, conspiratorial and mightily pleased with himself. “I have no intention of calling for her unless you wish it.” 

Miranda would fight and kill for James McGraw, if she was given the chance. There was nothing she would not do to bring about a world where his smiles would outnumber his grimaces, where he would laugh freely and openly and shed only tears of happiness. For now, though, she would lie here with him and do absolutely nothing for just as long as she pleased.

“Do you wish it?” he asked a few minutes later, as though it had only just occurred to him to ask.

“No,” Miranda murmured. She very carefully shifted so she could drape across his chest again, and his arms came up around her. She closed her eyes and thought very diligently about nothing at all.


	6. Chapter 6

Miss Martin was more than a little scandalised that Miranda wanted only James to tend to her, leaving her to do nothing but carry water and other essentials to and from the room, but after four days had passed she seemed to have largely recovered from the shock. Miranda even saw her smile at James when he thanked her and bid her good night, though it was a fleeting and tentative thing. James seemed pleased by it when he came to sit by Miranda at the head of the bed, leaning back against one pillow where Miranda had claimed four for herself. He tilted his head back against the headboard, his eyes half-closed and his throat quite deliciously presented to Miranda’s eyes. 

She reached over and ran the tips of two fingers up his Adam’s apple, watching it jump as his whiskers tickled. He looked at her sideways without moving, and she smiled and did it again before taking her hand away. Much as Miranda would like to touch him some more, in many different places, she did not want James to think she was asking anything of him that he was not of a mind to give.

“Tomorrow I might go out,” she said. “I think the worst of it is past.”

James made a slow sound of assent and closed his eyes.

“Unless you would rather stay in here another day?”

He did not open his eyes or move his head, only furrowed his brow.

“It is restful, in its way,” Miranda said generously. “I would not mind it.”

His scowl deepened.

“It is like pulling teeth with you,” Miranda declared. “You wait on me hand and foot for four days without complaint, isolate yourself in this room with me quite completely, but if I broach the subject of what you might like or need, I am scorned for it.”

“I do not scorn you.”

“You snub me, at the very least.”

He sighed and opened his eyes, turning his head to look at her properly. “I do not mean to,” he said. “There is very little I would consider restful right now; I will stay in or go out, as you like.”

Miranda shifted against the pillows, never quite comfortable with her insides so tormented. James watched her, making no move and no comment until she was settled again.

“I would sooner not –” He stopped and cocked his head, listening intently. 

Miranda strained to hear what he heard: a low murmur of voices outside their door. One was a man’s voice, and the other – “Is that Abigail?” she whispered.

James nodded, but his gaze was intent on the door. He put a reassuring hand on Miranda’s arm for a moment before sliding out of bed. He moved noiselessly toward the door and stopped a few feet from it to listen for a moment before going the rest of the way and opening the door.

“Mr McGraw,” said Mr Terris. Miranda could see his boots, but James obstructed her view of any other part of him. “If you would please return to –”

“I only wish to sit with Mrs Hamilton a while,” Abigail said, her voice clear and her words assured. “I know at such times a woman may desire company.”

“She has company, ma’am,” Terris said. 

“I understand Mr McGraw has been looking after her,” Abigail said. “I am sure he is doing as well as he can, but sometimes a woman is what is needed, Mr Terris. I am sure you will understand.”

Miranda was certain he did not understand; she was equally certain he would not be so bold as to say so. He cleared his throat indecisively. “Well, we can’t have you –”

“I will wait outside,” James offered deferentially. “I would not wish to intrude on any women’s business.” He stepped out into the hallway and out of Miranda’s sight; Miranda barely caught a glimpse of Mr Terris’s frown before Abigail took his place, coming through the doorway and very quickly shutting the door behind her. She was in her nightgown and slippers and her hair flowed loose down her back. She looked at Miranda first with concern and then, after a second, with visible relief. Miranda held a hand out to her and she hurried over, taking Miranda’s hand in hers and only hesitating a moment before sitting down on the edge of the bed beside her. 

“I hope you do not mind that I have come,” she said. “I needed to see you.”

“Of course I do not mind,” Miranda said, who was quite thoroughly delighted by it. “I have wanted to see you as well.”

“Are you very poorly?”

“No, not any more. I was just saying to James that I will likely be up and about again tomorrow.”

Abigail looked a little abashed. “I thought there might be something my father was not telling me,” she said. “I was worried that something had happened.”

“I am quite all right,” Miranda assured her. “But I thank you for your concern.”

Abigail nodded, dropping her gaze to the floor. “My…” She looked up at Miranda again, her eyes wistful. “My mother said that when her time of the month came, she always wanted something to do. She wanted company to distract her from – from what everything felt like, and from the pain. You have been … I know not everyone is the same, but –”

“James has been perfectly attentive,” Miranda reassured her. “I have been very well looked after.” 

Abigail bit her bottom lip, wrestling with herself for a moment. It was plain to Miranda what she was thinking of; Miranda had been thinking the same from the moment she had heard Abigail’s voice outside their door.

“I am glad you have come,” she said in her warmest and most inviting manner. “It is very good to see you.”

“Can I get you anything? Is there anything you need?”

“No, Abigail. Do not worry yourself. I am quite all right.”

“Do you – would you mind if I stayed a while?”

“Please,” Miranda said, patting the spot James had vacated in invitation. Abigail rose to her feet, walked around the bed and sat down where Miranda had indicated, letting her slippers fall to the floor and drawing her feet tentatively up onto the bed. _This is what it would be like to have a daughter_ , Miranda thought, and then she entirely put it out of her mind. There would be no hope for her at all if she started thinking like that.

“If nobody comes to fetch me immediately,” Abigail said, “perhaps you could continue to – if you are not too – I would like to hear the rest of your story, if you still wish to tell it to me. I know you cannot do so with anybody else listening, so I thought –”

“Of course,” Miranda said. “I have been hoping for an opportunity to do so.”

Abigail settled back against the pillow with her knees bent and her hands clasped together on top. Then she jolted a little, her eyes wide, as she seemed to realise the impropriety of exactly where she was and who must have been there before her. After a moment’s indecision, a calm sort of resolution came over her; she set her jaw and stayed where she was. “I am sorry that Mr McGraw has had to leave,” she said. “Please thank him, once I am gone again.”

“He will be glad you have come to visit,” Miranda said. “He is concerned that you feel yourself to be alone here.”

“He is?”

Miranda nodded. “Left to his own devices, he is the retiring type,” she said. “Until I became indisposed, he had been insisting we sit in the drawing room most of each day so that you might come and sit with me if your father permitted.”

“But he does not – he barely even looks at me when he is there. He is always off by himself frowning.”

“He does not wish to jeopardise the time you and I have together by arousing anybody’s suspicions or displeasure regarding his own involvement,” Miranda said. “He removes himself to put their minds more at ease.”

The explanation did not satisfy Abigail. Her frustration only grew, her mouth tight and her brows lowered. “Then how is it he can do all those dreadful things?” she asked unhappily. “He devotes himself to you, he comes here on a mission of peace, he spends his time here thinking about me and what he can do to help me, but all those men on that ship, all the stories I have heard of him – how can he do it?”

“Shhh,” Miranda said, looking meaningfully at the closed door.

Abigail nodded, forcibly calming herself. “I –”

“You wonder also how I could involve myself in such darkness, I am sure.”

Abigail looked mortified, but she did not deny the truth of Miranda’s words.

“I will tell you.”

Abigail took a deep breath, set her shoulders and regarded Miranda with a studied, if fragile, calm. Miranda took a deep breath and began.

“I have told you the circumstances in which Thomas and I came to be married,” she said. She spoke briskly but did not rush; there may not be much time in which to tell this story, but above all it must be told properly. “Thomas’s father, Lord Alfred Hamilton, was one of the Lords Proprietor of the Carolina colony. He tasked Thomas, his eldest son, with the rescue and rehabilitation of New Providence Island. At that time, the island was a pirate lair in all but name, its governor corrupted and controlled by the pirate captains of Nassau. Alfred Hamilton requested a liaison from the Navy to work with Thomas, and James was chosen by the Admiralty to be that liaison. Lieutenant McGraw he was then, and there was little doubt in anybody’s mind that he was only at the very beginning of a long and illustrious career. He was quite brilliant, forthright and tenacious. Thomas and I both liked him a great deal, and he soon became a friend to us both.”

Miranda wished very much that she could take the time to properly explain to Abigail how it had all unfolded between the three of them. She wanted to paint a proper picture of the James McGraw she and Thomas had loved in London, but in that she did not have a blank canvas to work with, as she had with Thomas. She could not wipe away all that Abigail knew of Captain Flint and replace it with Miranda’s memories of the man he had used to be. She must set the scene and then come as quickly as she could to Peter’s part in it; that was the part Abigail had truly come to hear. Her position on it might well be the thing that saved Miranda and James’s lives when Peter’s two weeks finally elapsed.

“Indeed, he became quite famously a friend to us both,” she continued. “I believe he faced a considerable amount of ridicule from his peers in the Navy, a common-born sailor having stepped so high above his station as to enter the social circle of Lord Thomas Hamilton and his wife. But we wanted him there, and he flourished there. I believe he began to belong there. His primary duty was the plan for New Providence Island, of course, and he devoted himself to it quite as much as Thomas did. They worked long days and long nights, and the plan they formulated together was sound, but there was one point on which they differed and differed strongly. Thomas was of the unshakeable belief that the solution to the problem of the pirates of Nassau was to introduce a universal pardon to the island: to take the men who were pirates there, forgive them their sins and put them to work in legitimate occupations, living in fear of no one and under the protection of the Crown.”

“To pardon all the pirates?” Abigail said in soft wonder. “All at once?”

“Yes,” Miranda said. “James made every attempt to dissuade Thomas from the idea, knowing it would be so politically unpopular as to jeopardise the entire plan and to ostracise Thomas irreconcilably from his father, but Thomas was not a man easily dissuaded. The pardons were anathema to Alfred Hamilton, but Thomas considered them of foundational importance to his plan and would not resile from them. He included them when presenting his proposal, and his father reacted with anger and disgust, as Thomas had known he would. The relationship between the two of them had never been a happy one. Heated words were exchanged, and James categorically threw his lot in with Thomas, declaring his strong support for the pardons and the utmost distaste at Alfred’s mode of expressing himself. The battle lines were thus drawn between them.”

“His mode of expressing himself? How did he –”

“Lord Alfred Hamilton was a vile old man,” Miranda said plainly. “James told him so.”

Abigail gaped at her. “He told him –”

“Not in those exact words,” Miranda conceded. “But he made his meaning perfectly plain.”

“But he – that is, he –”

“James does not lack for courage.”

“No, but – Lord Alfred Hamilton was an earl, was he not?”

“He was.”

Abigail sat in mute shock, and Miranda gave her a moment to recover from it. She could use a moment’s respite herself. It was for very good reason that she did not usually allow her mind to come back to this evening; she could still vividly remember how heavy her heart had grown even as she had seen James’s and Thomas’s swell with newly-discovered joy. 

James’s short speech after Alfred left had been directed to Thomas, and it was Thomas who had kissed him and claimed him thereafter, but the thing that had finally broken James’s steady reserve, that had brought him to his feet to throw his career and his life on the woodpile and set it ablaze, had been words Miranda had heard dozens of times over, that Thomas had heard dozens of times over, that Alfred had no doubt said hundreds of times and thought nothing of at all. _Keep your legs shut_ , Alfred had said to Miranda, and James had not been able to bear it. _I support it,_ he had said, as quickly as he could manage. He had not made his stand on the practical merits of Thomas’s proposal; he had done it on impulse, in opposition to Alfred Hamilton, because Alfred Hamilton had offended his sensibilities, and he had stood firm behind it once it was done.

 _You’re a good man_ , James had said to Thomas, but Miranda knew the best man in that room in that moment, and it had not been her visionary husband but the gallant, idiotic Navy officer standing opposite her and doing a thing that he knew could destroy him because he felt that it was right. Thomas had known it too – of course he had known it – and he had taken something dangerous and made it infinitely more so by choosing that moment to finally make his heart’s desire known. What hope did James have, after that, to think clearly about any of it? What hope did he have to settle his heart and consider his circumstances rationally, when a light had come into his life so extraordinarily bright that there could be no looking away from it? 

What could Miranda feel but dread, knowing that however canny and conscientious he might otherwise be, James McGraw was a man who would be ruled entirely by his heart in such a crucial moment?

“Until that day, James was the only one of the three of us who still did not know that Thomas loved him,” Miranda said, focusing her thoughts on what she must tell Abigail, rather than the fruitless reminiscing it inspired in her. She could feel tears beginning to threaten, and in her current state she was far less capable of resisting them than she usually would be. “After that day, he was left in no doubt of it. They … I do not know if you have ever seen two people so much in love that it feels indecent, sometimes, to simply watch them talk or laugh together. So it was with Thomas and James. James could disguise his feelings well enough in company; Thomas had less skill in it, but he had always been considered odd, and it worked to his advantage. I had the privileged position of observing it firsthand, private and unguarded, and I can assure you there was no greater or purer love on this earth.”

“But the earl,” Abigail breathed fearfully. 

“Yes,” said Miranda. The story was nearly at its end; it must not be interrupted now, and so she would tell it as simply and quickly as she could. “We had very little support from those we had called friends. We made an appeal that very day to a roomful of men and women whose support we had hoped for, and only your father stood by us and committed to Thomas’s plan against the known wishes of Lord Hamilton.”

“My father wanted to pardon all the pirates of Nassau?” Abigail asked, her voice quiet but sharp with disbelief.

“Yes, he did.”

“Why?”

Miranda shook her head. “I could not tell you whether he was motivated by pragmatism or principle, but he was most certainly of the opinion that the pardons should be issued. When James was posted to Nassau for a time, Thomas and Peter carried on the work in London, defying and opposing the political will and political power of Thomas’s father. Without Peter, there would have been no hope for it.”

“But it went wrong,” Abigail said, whisper-quiet. “Lord Alfred Hamilton had his way.”

A single tear spilled over; Miranda closed her eyes tightly and fought back the rest. Abigail reached out and took her hand, holding it cautiously at first and then more firmly when Miranda’s fingers curled around hers. “Governor Thompson was expelled from Nassau by Edward Teach,” Miranda said. “His wife and his son were murdered in the street. Pirates laid full claim to the island. Peter and I thought all hope was lost, and even Thomas despaired at the news, but James insisted there was still a way that it might be done: by direct appeal to the Sea Lords. He argued that in a time of war it would be of great military advantage to have proper control over Nassau and that such control could not be achieved in a timely way by any method other than a universal military pardon. When James went to speak to his superiors, men came to our house and took Thomas away to Bethlem Hospital. I was told that James and I were to leave England that night and must never be seen again. James returned to the house having been summarily discharged from the Navy and told the same. The story to be put about was that Thomas had discovered that James and I were having an affair and had gone mad with grief, and the two of us fled the country to avoid facing any consequences.” 

Abigail’s grip now ground the bones of Miranda’s hand. “And the truth?”

Miranda had not intended to tell Abigail every part of that truth, but that desperate grip and wavering voice pulled it out of her. “I do not want to deceive you, Abigail, by omission or in any other way,” she said, and found that it was true. “I did begin an affair with James soon after we had met him. That much is true. But Thomas knew of it all along. He thought us well suited to each other, and he told me so. That was the nature of our marriage; he made no claim on me, nor I on him. We did not keep secrets from one another. We were partners.”

Abigail did not say anything; she only held on tightly to Miranda’s hand.

“Alfred Hamilton would never allow Thomas’s plan to go ahead as it had been proposed to him. He was determined to silence his son by whatever means he had available. He had a suspicion that Thomas and James were lovers, and when he pressed Peter on the matter, Peter said that it was so. Your father’s word is what Alfred Hamilton took to the Admiralty to have James discharged from the Navy and exiled from his country under threat of the noose. It is the reason Thomas was sent to Bethlem Royal Hospital, where it was reported he took his own life soon after. That is why your father is governor here: Alfred Hamilton returned the favour that Peter had done for him. That is the full truth of it. That is the history that informs everything that is happening here. That is why I consider the blow James landed on your father to have been most thoroughly deserved.”

“Oh,” Abigail said, her voice as weak as her fingers were strong. Miranda did not know how long they sat in silence after that; she was all too familiar with the way even five seconds could sometimes feel an age. When Abigail finally spoke again, she sounded every bit the little girl Miranda had remembered from London. “Thank you for telling me.” 

Miranda opened her eyes again, feeling too wretched even for tears. “Peter now tells us that Thomas did not die in Bethlem, as he himself had written to inform us many years ago, but was secreted away somewhere else soon after he had been sent there. He tells us that we will be seeing him again very soon – five days from now, or so he says. You can understand that is very difficult for us to believe. You might also understand how desperately James wants to believe it.”

“That Thomas did not die?” Abigail said urgently, life rushing back into her voice. “He says that Thomas – that Lord Hamilton is still alive?”

“He does.”

“And so you are – you are waiting here for him?”

“We have little choice in the matter,” said Miranda. “There is nowhere for us to go.”

Abigail finally let go of Miranda’s hand and hugged her knees to her chest, staring out in front of her. “How awful for you,” she said. “How awful. How _awful_.”

Miranda felt lightheaded and a little shivery, but the thing was not quite done yet and Abigail must not be distracted by any concerns over Miranda’s health. She gathered her strength and spoke as evenly as she might. “It has all taken us very much by surprise,” she said. “We did not know, coming here, that your father had played any role in what had happened to us all those years ago. We thought him an old friend who might once again become an ally.”

“How awful,” Abigail whispered again.

“I hope I have now answered the question you asked me earlier,” Miranda said. “James refused to give up on Thomas’s dream. He would defy Alfred Hamilton to the end. After we were exiled, all we had left were our wits and James’s seamanship. To change Nassau, to save Nassau, we had to make ourselves a part of it first. That is why he became Captain Flint.”

Abigail nodded. She sat quietly for a time, still hugging her knees. Then she roused herself and turned to face Miranda. 

“Lord Alfred Hamilton sent his son into hospital and you and Mr McGraw into exile in revenge for his son and Mr McGraw having crossed him,” she said. “Mr McGraw took revenge on Lord Alfred Hamilton for having done this, and my father has been taking revenge on pirates everywhere for his having done that.”

“There you have it,” Miranda said faintly. “We have learned nothing in over two thousand years.”

“But you have,” Abigail protested. “You and he came here to make peace. You have come on a mission of mercy.”

“Yes,” Miranda said. “But it is far from over.”

Abigail nodded. Then she very carefully met Miranda’s eyes. “Thank you for telling me the truth,” she said earnestly. “I know you did not have to. I do not know – perhaps you did not want to. You can trust that I will share none of it with anybody, ever, unless I have your blessing to do so. You need not worry on your or Mr McGraw’s behalf – or your husband’s, if he is alive as my father claims. Nobody will hear of it from me.”

“Oh, Abigail,” Miranda said, taking her into her arms. She could not stop the tears now, but there was no real need to do so. It was over. The story had been told. “You are a good girl.”

She held Abigail close until there was a knock on the door, soft at first and quickly becoming more urgent. Abigail jolted away, wiping her face, and quickly climbed off the bed. She brushed her hand down her nightgown, composed herself, walked to the door and opened it to find her father standing on the other side.

“Abigail,” he said, taking her hand and drawing her firmly out of the room. “I have been looking for you.”

“I came to sit with Mrs Hamilton,” Abigail said with quiet dignity. “I have recently come to share in – it is a shared experience.”

Peter looked past her at Miranda. Miranda sat where she was, teary-eyed among pillows and blankets, and allowed herself to look as miserable and exhausted as she felt.

“You ought to have told Mrs Griffiths,” Peter said to Abigail. “We were terribly worried.”

“It is delicate,” Abigail said. “I did not think I would be looked for.”

“Come with me now,” he said. “Mr Terris, we will be having words.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Good night, Mrs Hamilton,” Abigail said, resisting for a moment as Peter attempted to lead her away. “When you are well enough, I hope you will sit with me again in the afternoons. I hope you will be feeling much better soon.”

“Thank you, dear,” Miranda said. “I hope I will be able to join you tomorrow, if only for a little while.”

Abigail smiled at her once more and then left with her father. James came back in, closing the door behind him and leaning back against it for a moment, the same way he had used to coming back to the house on Nassau, letting the worst excesses of Captain Flint flow away from him before he came any further into their home. 

“Put out the candles and come to bed,” Miranda said to him. “I am ready to sleep.”

He did as she instructed, and when the room was dark and they had settled in beside each other, he finally spoke. “I could not have done it,” he said, and the admiration Miranda heard in his voice went a long way to calming the mass of emotions writhing inside her. “You are strong in a way I can only dream of being.”

“Stronger than Captain Flint,” Miranda mused. Her heart was too brittle for her to speak from its depths, so for the moment she would not. “Now there’s a commendation.”

“If not for the accident of your birth, you could have made a truly fearsome pirate,” James said, sounding quietly amused with himself. “We could have terrorised the seven seas together – Flint and Barlow, Barlow and Flint. Nobody would look at Rackham and Bonny for a second; they are a pale imitation of everything you and I could be.”

“The accident of my birth, you say?”

Miranda could not see James’s smile, but she could hear it so clearly in his voice. “I do not hold it against you,” he said. “We are all limited by the spheres into which we are born.”

“You are being facile.”

“Perhaps.”

Miranda tried to imagine a world where she could fight like Anne Bonny, where she was known and feared and hated like Anne Bonny. She thought of the horrors a girl must necessarily endure on the way to becoming such a woman and found not a trace of envy inside her. Miranda’s birth had been no accident but a blessing whose depth she had not truly known until she had come to Nassau and been forced to see how so many others must live.

“I am being facile,” James allowed. “So were you.”

“Aren’t we a pair.”

“Aren’t we just.” He waited a moment, questions lingering in the air between them. In the end, he simply asked, “You do not wish to discuss it?”

“Discuss Abigail, or the story I told her?”

“I meant Abigail,” he said, “but if you wish to –”

“It is a little late, I think, to start discussing it now.”

He was quiet. Miranda knew very well that he had heard both the meanings she intended.

“It is best I sleep. I would like to take up Abigail’s invitation tomorrow.”

“All right,” James said. “Would you like to –”

“I am quite comfortable where I am,” Miranda said. “But thank you.”

“Good night, then,” he said. Miranda was far too tired to concern herself with the nervous edge in his voice. It was his turn, still, to look after her. She closed her eyes and lay still until sleep came and took her.


	7. Chapter 7

Miranda woke late on the morning of the next day, the tenth day, to find James watching her, his body relaxed on the bed and his eyes calm and thoughtful. His only reaction to Miranda opening her eyes was to smile a little – a twitch of the mouth and a crinkling around the eyes – before settling back into his easy peace.

“Sleep well?” she asked in faint hope.

“Not really. You?”

“Yes, I think I might have.”

James smoothed a hand lightly over her hair. “Good.”

Indeed, Miranda felt something of a rising energy as she lay there, not dissimilar to the one she had felt when Pastor Lambrick had stood in her home and put a name to Charles Vane’s prisoner. She had done what she could to win Abigail. She had entirely refrained from attempting to murder Peter. James was far more settled after four days’ repose with only Miranda’s care to focus on, and though Miranda was fairly certain that he had not slept more than half of any of the nights they had spent in this place, he had at least slept half of some of them. Short of giving Thomas up as a lost hope and taking matters entirely into their own hands, they were close to as well-positioned as they could possibly be. 

The future ahead of Miranda was one she would make for herself. She was confident by now that, barring unforeseen and extraordinary events, there would be no public trial and no executions. That was a beginning, but only a beginning. There was every chance Peter still intended to have them sent away, as they had been before, or to impose insupportable conditions on any pardon or other negotiated outcome that was offered. He held the balance of power by an extraordinary margin and had thus far resisted any show of outright force against them, but he would be feeling the weight of his people’s expectations in circumstances where he could never explain the real reason for his leniency. There could be no relying on Peter to keep his word and retain his principles when put under any significant pressure.

Miranda was certain that word would have spread all through Charles Town, and even wider afield, that Governor Ashe held Captain Flint prisoner in his home. By now they would be desperately hungry to see him hang. They would be ravenous for it, and no doubt they would take great pleasure in seeing Miranda hanged right alongside him. After ten years living as Mrs Barlow, Miranda had a fair idea of the kinds of things that would be screamed at her as she stood before them. When Thomas had spoken to her of the public hanging he had gone to with James in the earliest days of their acquaintance, he had very nearly shuddered with horror in the telling of it. _The size of the crowd,_ he had said despairingly, slumped back on the sofa with a glass of brandy. _The awful sound of them. I tell you it was quite beyond description. It ought never to have been done that way. It must not be done that way in the future._

To deny the mob their spectacle would cost Peter something, and if he had a plan to recoup that loss, Miranda wanted to know what it was. It was time for Peter to lay his cards out on the table and explain how he intended to play his hand. If his intentions were what he claimed them to be, he could only be assisted by Miranda and James’s input. If they were not, other plans would need to be made, and soon. Miranda had come too far with James, with Abigail and with the management of her own anger, to let it fall away from her now.

When Miss Martin had come with the water, Miranda washed herself and shared with James how Abigail had reacted to last night’s story but said little else about it. She had a great deal to think about and little she wanted to say to James until she had properly reflected on it all. James did not seem willing to ask for anything more than Miranda had already offered, so they spent a quiet morning each in their own thoughts. Miranda found herself peculiarly comforted by it. Theirs was a relationship well-practised in leaving things unsaid.

When it was nearly time to go downstairs for lunch, Miranda had James brush her hair out for a good ten minutes before leaving him to his own while she washed herself yet again and carefully arranged her underthings. 

“Do you think you will need to come back up some time in the afternoon?” James asked as Miranda pulled on her stockings. 

“Quite possibly.”

James nodded and came over to assist, still in stockinged feet but otherwise dressed and ready to go. The shirts he had been given were all the same drab shade of brown, and he had declined to wear any of the formal outerwear provided to him, preferring the comfort of his own heavy coat as they moved around the house and during meals. He had not been permitted a razor, and his beard had grown in along his jaw. In simple shirt and breeches like this, with his head turned in such a way that his earring was not in view, he looked as close to ordinary as Miranda had ever seen him. 

“I wonder, if you were to cut your hair and shave your beard, whether you could not go out and walk among the people of Charles Town and go entirely unremarked upon,” she said as he laced her stays. “They have never really seen you.”

“Perhaps I could,” he said. “I’ve no appetite to try.”

“I do not know that I would recognise you myself.”

James sniffed and handed Miranda her dress. “I remember you were very upset with me the first time I cut it.”

“I was not upset. I was surprised.”

James shot her an amused look. “You were upset.”

“You had not warned me.”

“Was I obliged to?”

“Of course,” Miranda said. “I look at you far more than you look at yourself, and I therefore have the largest stake in the matter.”

He smiled at that, then positioned himself behind her once more to help with her hair, which in the main consisted of taking whatever she handed him and holding it out of the way as she worked. 

“I will be requesting an audience with Peter tonight after dinner,” she said as soon as she was done. “I think it is past time we three had an honest conversation.”

There was a knock on the door. Miranda quickly put her earrings in as James sat and pulled on his boots.

“I don’t imagine an honest conversation between the three of us ending particularly well,” James said, collecting his book and coat and joining Miranda at the door.

“The odds may be remote,” she said as he opened the door for her. “But there is always the chance.”

* * *

Mrs Griffiths surprised Miranda by offering some words of quiet sympathy when she came into the drawing room after lunch, handing Miranda’s embroidery to her and not frowning at all when she removed herself to the window and Abigail promptly followed her. Something had changed in the relationship between Abigail and her chaperone, and the effect of it quite transformed the room. Miranda was mightily curious about what might have caused such a turn, but she could only observe that something in Abigail had settled and that Mrs Griffiths was a great deal more comfortable in her duties than she had been in the days before Miranda and James’s absence. Even James was not untouched by the changed atmosphere, being considerably more inclined to sneak glances at Miranda and Abigail than he had been before.

It was almost too calm an afternoon, too easy a resolution to all the undercurrents that had plagued this room from the very first time they had entered it. Miranda finished stitching the pelvis of her skeleton and made it a little way up the spine – to this point, anyone looking at it might yet think she intended to embroider playing cards and had started with a spade – before she had Mr Dickens escort her and James upstairs so she could wash out and replace her padding and take a moment’s respite before going back down again.

“I can almost breathe down there,” James said wryly, standing at the window and looking down across the grounds. “You may be a witch after all.”

“I have certainly cast no spell over Mrs Griffiths,” Miranda said. “Abigail has done that.”

He looked at her over his shoulder, half smiling. “Your apprentice, then.”

“Would that she could be.”

In ten minutes Miranda was ready to go down again, but James stood in front of her when she headed toward the door, blocking her way. “This honest conversation with Peter,” he said. “What do you hope to gain from it?”

“To learn what progress he has made,” Miranda said. “To read what his intentions may be. To offer our assistance with any obstacles he might be facing. To remind him that he cannot simply do as he likes and keep us entirely in the dark.”

James stood there still. “And if you are not satisfied with his response?”

“I will see to it that I am satisfied,” she declared. “It has been ten days. He must have something to say to us by now.”

There were doubts in James’s eyes still, but he nodded and stood aside from her. He could have no real criticism of Miranda’s plan of action unless he did not trust she would implement it wisely. He made no criticism. 

“I know you do not want to needlessly provoke him, with what is at stake,” Miranda said as she went the rest of the way to the door. “But sometimes a little provocation is precisely what is required.”

“Is it?” James said, his voice quite perfectly bland.

“I’m sure you know nothing about that.”

“No,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

* * *

After dinner, once Abigail had left the room with Mrs Griffiths and Mr Dickens had been forbidden from entering without Peter’s express permission, Peter sat back in his chair, clasped his hands together and regarded Miranda with a more relaxed sort of confidence than she had anticipated. “Is there something particular you would like to discuss?”

“Yes,” Miranda said. “I would like to discuss what you have been doing for the past ten days. I would like to discuss how the next four might unfold.”

Peter nodded and looked along to where James sat beside her. “James?”

James looked him right in the eye and spoke in a manner that an uncharitable soul might have called provocative. “My hanging still inevitable?”

“No, it is not,” Peter said, his polite tone already beginning to strain. “I never said that it was.”

“There won’t be a trial, then.”

“I am very much hoping not. Would you like me to tell you where things stand, or would you prefer to continue like this?”

“I am more than happy to –”

“The former, please,” Miranda said.

Peter gave James an irritated look then attempted to return to his earlier state of equanimity, meeting Miranda’s eyes as though they were the only two adults in the room. 

“Pardons are more easily come by now than they were ten years ago,” he said, “but they still need justifying. I believe I can see a path to yours.” He paused here to gauge their reactions. Miranda was pleased not to give him one, and from the look on Peter’s face, James’s had been none too favourable. So Peter braced himself and went on. “There are three things that would be required of you, and the first you have done already: the rescue and safe return of Abigail to my custody. For this you not only have my personal gratitude, but you have laid the first stone, so to speak, in what can be built from it. Public sentiment is easily swayed by tales of fair maidens rescued from monsters, and when partnered with –”

“Can I assume from the direction of this, and given your recent revelations, that you no longer wish me to stand up before Whitehall and _reveal everything_?” James asked acidly. “You no longer consider exposure of the complete truth to be the solution to all our problems?”

Peter sighed. “I understand that you are angry, but –”

“ _But_?” Miranda said, quite forgetting that she had been playing nicely. “You understand that we are angry, _but_?”

“Miranda, I –”

“If you were capable of answering a simple fucking question, this would go much more smoothly,” James said, his tone sharper still. “I will ask you again. Is my humiliation no longer to be necessary?”

Peter glanced to the left, away from both of them, and swallowed. He held back his next words for a time, the effort straining his face and no doubt impinging on his bruised cheek. Eventually, he turned back to them. “I fear the second requirement will be even less palatable to you than that.”

James looked at him with open suspicion, but Miranda did not share it; she knew what Peter would be asking for instead. “To keep it from them,” she said. “The second requirement is that no one outside the three of us is ever to know what you did.”

Peter gave her a searching look, seemingly distracted from his discomfort. “It is already known outside the three of us.”

That was quite true, but Miranda was not going to confirm what she had told Abigail unless he asked her directly. She had thought he might avoid the topic at all costs, or she had thought he might raise it as evidence of Miranda’s bad faith in their dealings. She sat calmly and waited for the accusation, if it was to come.

“Thomas knows it.”

Miranda did not blink. “So you say.”

She could not read Peter’s tiny smile then, nor the considerable length of time he held her gaze before looking away to regard them both more generally. “I know there is little point in asking for absolute silence from you,” he said. “I do not ask for it.”

Unpalatable, Peter had said. Something even less palatable than exposing everything of James to the nation’s judgement. What he must be asking for…

“A lie,” James said. “A lie presented to Whitehall to serve your interests as well as ours.”

Peter nodded. “You have rescued Abigail Ashe, and that is a beginning. You will soon have rescued Thomas Hamilton, and that will be something truly extraordinary. It will take quite an explanation.”

“And you intend Alfred Hamilton to be the only villain of the piece,” Miranda said.

“Yes.”

“He had Thomas sent to Bethlem for nothing but political expedience,” James said, his voice heavy. “He invented the lie about the affair because he knew Miranda and I would seek our revenge on him at any cost and he needed us disposed of. He managed to convince you, though, of the truth of that lie. You truly thought Thomas ill-used by us, and you believed him dead until Miranda and I brought your daughter safely to Charles Town, along with a piece of news that shocked you to the depths of your soul.”

“Yes.”

“Thomas Hamilton is returned to life and reunited with his widow and his closest friend. By the exposing and undoing of Alfred Hamilton’s unthinkable villainy, Captain Flint is unmasked and so the monster is slain.”

“Yes.”

Bile was rising in Miranda’s throat, but James only sat in contemplation for a moment and then nodded. “What is the third requirement?”

“A denunciation of Captain Flint and all that he was by way of a renewed commitment to the civilisation of New Providence Island,” Peter said. “If it can be done peacefully, that is all very well. If it cannot be done peacefully, you must see it subdued and returned to the Crown.”

“That is too much to ask of him,” Miranda said. “It is too much.”

“I am asking it also of you.”

“Thomas will not like it,” James commented, his voice still mild. “If he had been willing to subdue Nassau by force, we would have done it ten years ago.”

_Dead men cannot make objections,_ Miranda thought. _Dead men tell no tales._

“I am willing to find a peaceful solution,” Peter said. “Of course I would prefer it to the alternative.”

“You are the one who has been standing in the way of the civilisation of Nassau by peaceful means,” Miranda said to Peter. “You have made monsters of all those men.”

“They have made monsters of themselves.”

James spoke quickly, forestalling the retort on the tip of Miranda’s tongue. “If there are pardons being granted on account of your daughter’s rescue,” he said, “one must go to Eleanor Guthrie. If an assault is made against Nassau, her safety must be guaranteed. She is of crucial importance to the future of that place.”

“To Eleanor Guthrie,” Peter said in some distaste. “Is that really necessary?”

Miranda had no love for Eleanor Guthrie, but compared to Peter she was a veritable angel. “If your personal gratitude to us is genuine, then you owe it also to Miss Guthrie,” she said. “We have delivered Abigail to you, but it was Eleanor who rescued her. In doing so, she made a mortal enemy of one of the most violent and dangerous men in the Americas.”

“Charles Vane,” Peter said, the name poison on his tongue.

“Charles Vane,” James confirmed. “She risked her life by the act itself, and she has left herself open to the most devastating vengeance he might imagine for her. She did that willingly so that this plan might be realised. That sacrifice must be given its due.”

“She grew up on that island and knows it like nobody else,” Miranda said. “For better or worse, she is Nassau.”

Peter nodded. “I accept that that is the case. However –”

“She can be given a part in the discovery of Thomas’s whereabouts, in addition to what she has done for Abigail,” Miranda suggested. “That must be enough to satisfy the requirements for a pardon.”

“Without Thomas, none of this is agreed,” James said. “Let there be no mistake about it.”

Peter sighed. “James, I have –”

“I don’t care how reasonable all the rest of it is,” James said abruptly. “I don’t give a fuck about the protection of your reputation and I don’t give a fuck about Nassau. If you are lying about Thomas, we will be coming to a very different kind of arrangement.”

“I am not lying.”

Neither looked away from the other until Miranda spoke again. “And what will you tell Abigail when it comes to your own conduct?” she asked. “The truth, or the convenient lie?”

“I know you have spoken to her about me,” Peter said flatly. “She has not shared with me whatever it is you have told her, but her behaviour makes it plain that you have.”

“Is that an answer to my question? Were you otherwise intending to lie to her?”

“It is not your concern what I say and do not say to my daughter,” Peter snapped. 

“No, but it is hers,” Miranda said, taking the opportunity to demonstrate her own composure now that Peter’s had cracked. “She cannot trust you, Peter, if you do not trust her.”

His lip curled. “Thank you for explaining that to me.”

“I do not say it for your sake but for hers,” Miranda told him. “This is a miserable place, Peter, and she will not be happy here if she thinks you do not want her.”

“You have led her to think ill of me.”

Miranda smiled at him sweetly. “Made a monster of you, have I?”

She saw the point land and a shadow pass over his face. “Just tell me,” he said wearily, “that there is something we can all work with in the plan I have outlined to you. Tell me I am not beating my head against solid rock.”

Miranda looked at the pale yellow bruise spread across his cheek and suppressed what she could of her smile, but Peter did not seem to realise he had said anything amusing. He looked gravely at Miranda and then at James, and the trace of pity in his eyes was agony to endure.

“Truly, I wish this had all gone differently,” he said. “I did not want to tell you about Thomas before I could prove the truth of it. I never wanted to rely on trust when it has already been broken between us.”

“When you have already broken it,” Miranda pointed out. Peter ground his teeth and cast his eyes down.

“If Thomas comes and he agrees to the lie you wish to tell the world,” James said slowly, “then I will go along with it. If he wishes to become involved in a plan to peacefully bring New Providence Island back under British rule, then I will work alongside him to that end. I will not under any circumstances go against his wishes in what is to come.” He reached for Miranda under the table, and she placed her hand in his. “His position will be informed, I am sure, by his wife’s insight and counsel.”

“I see,” Peter said. 

“If Thomas does not come, as I have already told you, then I agree to none of it.”

“So you have said.” Peter turned reluctantly to Miranda. “Do you have anything further you wish to say?”

“I think your proposal is reprehensible,” Miranda said. James’s hand tightened on hers, but when she looked at him he only nodded minutely, still not looking away from Peter. “I consider you deceitful and treacherous,” she continued, “and I look upon any assurance you give us with the greatest of suspicion. My opinion of you has not changed since the day your man attempted to shoot me dead and failed in the task. That is all I wish to say.”

Peter nodded. “That is not to say you will not go along with it.”

“No,” Miranda said. “In this regard, I am of a mind with James.”

“As I am of a mind with Miranda regarding the matters she has raised,” said James. 

“I can see that you are quite united,” Peter said. “I would not have expected anything less.”

James nodded and stood. Miranda stood with him. “You need to talk to your daughter, Peter,” she said. 

“I do talk to my daughter, Miranda.”

“Do you listen to her?”

Peter looked at Miranda coolly for a long moment, then rose and went to the door. “I will have Mr Dickens see you to your room.”

James let go of Miranda’s hand and followed her to the door. “Abigail is an extraordinary girl,” he said once they were right by Peter. “Do not diminish her.”

Peter pulled the door open and stood by it, silent and stone-faced. Miranda had done all she had come here to do. She wished Peter good night, and she and James followed Mr Dickens back upstairs.

* * *

A little into the afternoon of the eleventh day, Miranda looked up from the ribcage she was nearly finished stitching to see James staring into the middle distance, not even pretending to read. He had barely turned a page since he had first sat down, but until now he had at least put some sort of effort into the pretence. 

That morning, when the two of them had spoken of Nassau, he had been focused and incisive, applying his mind yet again to the question of how that accursed place might be civilised, forcibly or otherwise. He had found some relief, Miranda considered, in having his thoughts turned away from the personal and fixed on the strategic for a time. Miranda had shared with him her experiences of Pastor Lambrick’s congregation and the observations she had made of society in the interior. They had spoken at length of those key persons who must either be brought into agreement with each other or removed permanently if the island were to return to Britain without protracted and bloody conflict: Mr Underhill, Mr Edwards, Pastor Lambrick, Eleanor Guthrie, Richard Guthrie, the new madam and mistress of secrets at the brothel – Max, James called her – Josiah Burgess, Ben Hornigold, Charles Vane. 

The silent withdrawal of James’s ship had been unremarked on, as had all who had been aboard her. Thomas’s name had not been mentioned once all morning. The two of them could well have been sitting and plotting during a quiet moment at home, until the knock had come on the door to summon them to lunch. There had been a moment of mutual disorientation, and then Miranda had watched James’s face fall as reality came back and settled on his shoulders. He had been noticeably distant even as they made their way down the stairs, and by the time they were seated for lunch his demeanour was as forbidding as Miranda had seen it since the day they set sail for Charles Town. He had restrained himself from glowering at anybody directly, but the darkness of his thoughts could not help but be apparent to everybody who saw him.

“James,” Miranda called out to him now, and The Pilgrim’s Progress very nearly slid out of his lap as he jolted and turned to look at her. “Come here a moment?”

It took him a moment to decide to move and another to carefully place the book on the desk and push himself to his feet. He surveyed the room for a moment, seeing Mrs Griffiths working contentedly away at her embroidery, Abigail working at hers but very obviously distracted by his imminent approach, and Miranda, who fixed him with her absolute most determined look.

He did not resist it, but nor did he seem much enthused by the prospect of conversation. He came over to the window in much the same fashion as he had approached them the first time, when Miranda had summoned him to the harpsichord and bid him play. He did not quite stand at attention beside Miranda’s chair, but he stood with one hand behind his back and the other resting on his belt at the hip, his back a little too straight and his expression guarded. It did not suit him at all, not with the civilian clothing he wore and the company he was keeping, but he seemed stuck in it, whether willingly or otherwise.

After a moment Abigail looked up and smiled at him, and his lips twitched sideways in answer. His shoulders relaxed a little, and some of the stiffness went out of his back. Here was James again, who had always found it a great deal easier to return affection than to offer it of his own volition.

Miranda held her embroidery up so he could properly view it. “Is this the right number, dear?”

This was the first time James had seen the fruits of her labour, and his reaction was quite as Miranda had expected it to be. His brows drew together sharply, and the smile vanished from his face. “What are you –”

“I cannot quite remember the count.”

He looked with some concern at Abigail, and then searchingly at Miranda. “You are one short,” he said eventually. “There should be six gaps on each side.”

“Thank you,” Miranda said. “I shall add another row, then.”

“There is more of a curve at the bottom than you have here,” he added, reaching out and running a finger along the bottom ribs, first as she had stitched them and then to demonstrate the correct curvature. He saw Miranda’s disgruntled look and looked down at her with a smile. “You asked for my advice.”

“I don’t believe I did,” Miranda said. “I had only one question, and I asked it quite specifically.”

“Well, then,” James said. “I apologise for overstepping.”

His insincerity was palpable, and Miranda could not have been more pleased by it. Abigail had heard enough about James from Miranda; now she must see him for herself.

Surely enough, Abigail raised her eyes from her embroidery for a second time and addressed herself to James. “Mr McGraw,” she said, “will you play something?”

“Play something?” he echoed, looking at her with a small frown.

“The song you played last week was quite lovely,” she said. “I should like to hear it again, if you are inclined to play it for us.”

“Ah,” he said, with such ill-concealed dismay that Miranda very nearly laughed at him. “Miranda plays it much better.”

“She is already occupied,” Abigail pointed out. “I did not think you were doing anything.”

James had regained his poise and seemed ready to defy her. “Better to be doing nothing at all, I think, than a fine thing badly,” he said, the barest twinkle in his eye.

“Do you think so? How then can one learn to do anything at all?”

“If I were set on learning, I would sit down to my scales,” James said. “But I am not set on it. I will not perform when I have not earned the performance.”

Miranda held her embroidery up to James again, tracing her own finger along the bottom ribs as he had done. “Like this?”

“Yes,” he said, frowning again as he looked at it.

“Why don’t you join us, Mr McGraw,” Abigail suggested pleasantly. “You always seem so lonely over in the corner there.”

James’s frown turned to Abigail. “Do I?”

“You do, rather,” Miranda said. “Why don’t you come and read to us?”

“You want me to read –”

“Of course,” Miranda said. “There is no getting out of that by talking about a fine thing done badly _._ You read as well as anyone I have heard.”

James looked between Miranda and Abigail and then a little desperately at Mrs Griffiths, who was intent on ignoring him.

“There is nobody here who will rescue you, my dear.”

“Unless you would prefer to play,” Abigail said, mischief dancing in her eyes. Miranda had never seen her like this before, and she felt such a rush of warmth she was sure James must be able to feel it where he stood.

“Or you could try your hand at embroidery,” she suggested pertly. “Then you might not feel so out of place.”

James sighed, fetched his book and his chair and sat down in front of the middle window, facing Abigail and Miranda. He looked across at them one more time, as though to confirm he had not misjudged the situation – and also, Miranda was sure, in the hope of a last-minute reprieve – and then, after one very deep breath in and out again, he opened the book to the very beginning and began to read.

* * *

Peter did not join them for dinner that evening, and it was quite an extraordinarily pleasant one. Whatever magic Abigail had worked on Mrs Griffiths, it had had an astonishing effect. She was still a little staid, still matronly, but her formality was not as rigid and she no longer held her tongue against everything other than the most necessary communications. She had her own opinions about the passages James had read aloud that afternoon, and though Miranda did not agree with any of them, she was delighted to have them aired; she had always found politely-expressed disagreement to be among the best ways of establishing goodwill. Mrs Griffiths even contradicted James once, so possessed was she by the point she wanted to make. By the time she realised how openly she had done so, James had already graciously acknowledged her point and was beginning to explain how he differed from it. 

Miranda had not seen him so well-behaved since – well, she struggled to remember a time he had seen him so well-behaved. At dinner with the Pembertons, perhaps, when – or, no, the time she and Thomas had taken him to see Dido and Aeneas and they had found themselves seated with Captains Hancock and Cammish, who had spoken warmly to James but had not been able to conceal their surprise at seeing him there. His manners had been impeccable then – not only correct, as they always were in formal company, but pleasing as well, open and affable as Miranda had rarely seen him. The conversation between the three officers was something more than the professional camaraderie that Miranda had seen James participate in before; it had been abundantly clear that James genuinely liked these men, and they liked him. The evening had passed remarkably pleasantly, with James its linchpin and quite easy in the role. Miranda had wondered then at the many faces of James McGraw. Even as intimate as she was with him by then, sometimes she would turn to look at him and see a man she barely recognised. 

She had learned most of his faces by now – even if he did not wear them all in Miranda’s presence, she had still come to learn of them – and this was one of her very favourites: gentle, considerate and sincere. He did not wear it often, but he wore it so very beautifully. Miranda would like to see him wear it a great deal more.

To that end, she decided not to raise any difficult topics for conversation when they went upstairs for the night. The day had been pleasant, and she wanted to let it linger as long as it might. Tomorrow morning, she would sit James down and insist they properly plan for the contingency of Thomas not arriving and Peter being unable to satisfy them that he ever would. She was certain he already had any number of ideas in his head for that eventuality – James was never not making plans – but to speak them aloud would be to acknowledge the real possibility they would need to be implemented and to step back into the world that he had been forced to live in for ten long years against his will, where Thomas was dead and gone and could never come back to them. 

Miranda would give James this one night of peace before hardening her heart and asking him to harden his own. They must be properly prepared for things to go as wrong as they possibly could, and if it came to violence – she truly did not think it would come to violence, but God help them if it did – her life would be entirely in James’s hands. They must be very clear as regards the final wishes of the other. They must have come to terms with it all long before it happened, so that when the time came, they would both know exactly what to do. Nothing should be left to be decided in the moment. Nothing should be left to chance.

But tonight they lay in bed together and spoke of Abigail and the unexplained transformation of Mrs Griffiths, and they shared all the thoughts and criticisms they had each suppressed for the sake of politeness during the course of dinner. Miranda rather uncharitably compared Mrs Griffiths to some of the more puritanical women she had encountered in Pastor Lambrick’s congregation, and James told Miranda about the night his grandfather had come home drunk and taken a seven-year-old James with him to throw his father’s copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress into the sea. His grandfather had cursed the book and its author, his son-in-law, a long list of English monarchs, politicians and bishops, and every other Protestant living, dead or yet to be born. That was the moment, James said, that he had begun to understand the power a book could possess, though it was not until many years later, when he sat down with a copy to read for himself, that he had understood why his late grandfather had so hated this book in particular.

James’s childhood was a source of fascination to Miranda, all the more so because he did not tend to speak of it much. While she had been amusing herself stitching naughty designs into her samplers James had already been working, considerably younger than Miranda though he had been, a poor boy in a fishing village navigating a family life weighed down by conflict whose history and depth he could not possibly have comprehended at such a young age. So much of what James had become could be traced back to his very beginnings in Padstow, but Miranda was not sure to what extent he realised this was so. He did not speak of his life there as though it was anything out of the common way, and perhaps it was not, though it would always seem extraordinary to Miranda. Perhaps the only thing truly exceptional about James’s childhood was the ambition and the relentless drive he had possessed to leave it behind.

He spoke of it freely enough now, and in the spirit of reciprocity Miranda did the same. The anecdotes and observations she had to offer seemed fairly insipid when set against James’s, but he seemed just as intrigued by her upbringing as she was by his, so foreign were the particular details of each to the other. When the conversation had faded to vague murmurs and Miranda felt her eyes closing against her will, she snuggled up close to James, her head nestled in at his throat and her knees nudging at his thighs. “I love you, you know,” she said, kissing his neck and then settling in ready for sleep.

“Yes,” he said, his voice a low rumble right by her ear. He rubbed a hand over the back of her shoulders and left it to rest at the nape of her neck. “And I love you.”


	8. Chapter 8

On the twelfth morning, Miranda woke to find James already awake and sitting in the window, one foot up on the sill and the other on the floor, leaning back into the corner with his head tilted a little sideways so he could take in the grounds. He had that look in his eye that could only mean he was thinking of Thomas; Miranda had seen it a thousand times, in good times and in bad, and it had never been brought on by anything but thoughts of his life’s love. She had not seen it so untouched by pain in a decade.

Miranda could be ruthless when ruthlessness was called for, but she hoped she had never been heartless. They must make their contingency plans this morning, but it did not have to begin right this moment. She did nothing but watch James for a while, making no movement and giving him no indication that she had woken. His form was crying out to be painted, with the sunlight falling across his face just so, glowing warmly in his hair and beard and glittering in his eyes. But Miranda could not imagine him sitting for a painting, let alone exposing this aspect of himself to a painter, and so she lay and took it in all for herself for as long as she could.

Eventually he turned his head to look her way, and he did not seem much surprised to see her awake and watching him. He rubbed his jaw, brushed some stray hair out of his face and turned to sit with his back to the window, leaning his elbows on his knees. 

_You are beautiful_ , Miranda wanted to tell him, as she had used to when they were so much younger and did not know each other half so well and she had still been able to make him blush. It was on the very tip of her tongue and she meant it sincerely, but now was not the time for it. She would not take the risk of intensifying anything he had been feeling; she would let it fade from him slowly and peacefully in these hours of early morning, and then after breakfast she would do what she must to bring him firmly face to face with reality.

* * *

Peter joined them for breakfast for only the third time in twelve days, looking quite properly exhausted. The bruise had almost entirely faded from his cheek, but there were shadows under his eyes to rival James’s, and where Miranda despaired at the latter, she took no small pleasure in the former. If she must suffer and James must suffer, it was not much to ask that Peter suffered along with them.

Miranda and Abigail carried the conversation, as by now they were quite accustomed to doing, while James and Peter played a ridiculous game of keeping a very close eye on each other while pretending to pay no attention at all. James had more skill in it than Peter but was not as committed to the ruse, and eventually Peter tired of what was beginning to feel like mockery on James’s part and inserted himself into the conversation Miranda and his daughter were having about d’Anglebert’s _Pièces de clavecin_ , promising that he had a man looking to replace all the sheet music Abigail had lost when the _Good Fortune_ had been taken. James watched him with a triumphant gleam in his eye, considering he had won some sort of victory by it; Peter affected not to notice.

Abigail and Miranda were well into compiling a list of music for Peter’s man when there was a knock on the door and a house slave came in with a message for Peter, handing it to him and then standing back as he read it once, twice, three times. Miranda and James watched Peter; Abigail regarded the black man with quiet thoughtfulness for a moment before also looking to her father.

“Thank you,” Peter said over his shoulder. His slave bowed and left the room. Peter put the message down by his plate, read over it one more time and then turned it over. He made every effort to appear impassive when he finally looked up from it. Whatever he felt, he felt it so strongly that he was only capable of concealing the nature of that feeling, not its existence.

“I would like to speak to our guests privately, once we are done,” he said to Abigail.

“Of course,” Abigail said, politely inscrutable. She helped herself to three more biscuits, ate them slowly and then took one more cup of tea before excusing herself from the table and leaving the room.

As soon as the door closed behind her, Peter rested his palm flat against the message he had been given, took a steadying breath and looked at Miranda and James. 

“He will be arriving this afternoon,” he said, and Miranda cursed her sentimentality in delaying their preparation. Of course Peter would move before the deadline he had set. Of course he would not allow another two days’ friendship to grow between the two of them and Abigail. Of course he would seek to draw power back to him as he felt it slipping away. _Sentimental,_ she cursed herself. _Stupid._

She dared a glance at James and regretted it immediately. He was as far from ready for this as it was possible for him to be.

Peter cleared his throat. “So we will need to discuss the day’s events.”

* * *

“We should never have come here,” James said, looking around the bare interior of the house they had been taken to, peering into its corners with growing horror and despair. They stood in its single room, empty but for a single wooden bench and the odd household item, dusty and abandoned. The door was open where they had come in. Outside were the three men who had brought them here, twenty minutes north of town, in a closed-top carriage with its curtains drawn. The house’s only window had long since been boarded up, though sunlight shone through cracks between the planks.

Miranda did not entirely disagree with James’s assessment.

“I was stupid,” James said. “I was reckless. I was _credulous_. I cannot fathom what sort of –”

“Why don’t you sit down,” Miranda suggested, walking to the bench and sitting down on it.

James stared at her, his chest heaving with a strength of emotion that Miranda had contended with time and time again but never learned how to properly soothe. She was sure he had already forgotten what she had said to him.

“We are here now,” she said a little louder. “What’s done is done. Will you come and sit with me?”

James did not react for a long moment, but then after another wild look at the open door he came and sat down beside her, tense and shaking. “How could I think he would just be given back to us, as easy as that?” he said, holding his head in his hands. “How could I think we would come here, and he would walk in that door, alive and well? What could have possessed me? What could have possessed _you,_ to let me think it?”

Miranda rubbed his back. She looked at the open doorway and allowed herself to imagine, just for a moment, how it might be if Thomas were the next person to appear in it. 

“We will be taken from here,” James said, sitting up a little straighter and attempting to shrug Miranda’s hand off his back. She allowed it and then put her hand right back where it had been. “We will be handed over to other men, taken away and never seen or heard of again, and Peter will be answerable for none of it. He will never have to answer for a thing.”

“We will see it through,” Miranda said. “There is always the chance.”

James shook his head. “I am so sorry,” he said, letting his face fall into his hands again. “I am so fucking sorry.”

Miranda dug her fingers and thumb in at either side of the base of his neck, watching him tense at the sensation and then relax marginally as she worked her way around muscles that were impossibly, painfully tight. “For what?”

“For how this has all turned out,” James replied. “For insisting we go to Nassau. For insisting we come out here, alone and defenceless, on a fool’s errand. For all you have suffered on my account.”

“You are afraid,” Miranda said. “You are not accustomed to it. It is quite all right.”

James shrugged her hand off him again, sitting properly upright and turning to face her. “We will die here, in all probability. Here, or very close to here.”

“No,” Miranda said. “I do not think we will.”

“No? Why not?”

“Think,” Miranda urged him. “Apply your mind to something other than the worst possible outcome.”

He gave her a wounded look. “I always –”

“Whatever this is, it took Peter twelve days to arrange,” Miranda said. “To send us somewhere quiet and have us killed could have been seen to almost immediately.”

“If this was his last resort, then he would have waited until every other possibility was exhausted before putting it into place. He gave himself two weeks, with a very reliable fallback if all else came to nothing.” James gestured around them at the empty house. “This.”

“If we are to be killed, I suspect it will be far away from here.”

James snorted. “Optimistic of you.”

“I have very rarely been called an optimist,” Miranda said, unmoved and deadly serious. “Surely you do not think me one now.”

James subsided a little. “No,” he allowed. “I do not.”

“So listen,” she urged him. “I am not insensible to the danger we are in, but nor do I seek to make it into something it is not. I do not think we are in danger of our lives. Not immediate danger, at any rate.”

“I will fight to the death before we are separated,” James declared.

“As will I,” Miranda returned, staring him right in the eye and daring him to disapprove.

After a moment’s pause, he nodded. “Good.”

“I do not know why we have been brought here,” Miranda said. “Perhaps something dark is to take place here. Perhaps something is already taking place that required our absence from Peter’s house. Perhaps he is sending Abigail away and did not want us to be able to interfere. Whatever the case may be, I do not believe this place will be our end.”

“And that is not optimism?”

“No,” Miranda said. “It is based on good sense and reason.”

“Based on what information?”

“Based on Abigail.”

“On – Miranda, I cannot – you truly believe that her good opinion of us will be enough to stay Peter’s hand? One girl has become rather fond of us, and so Peter’s entire raison d’être must make way for her?”

“Yes,” Miranda said. “He loves her.”

James exhaled sharply and looked away. “That does not count for nearly as much as you think it does.”

“He loves her, and he is weak.”

He turned back. 

“He sacrificed us all for her sake,” Miranda said. “I know he was made governor, and I will always hate him for what he has done. I do believe he was principally motivated by the need to protect his wife and daughter from Alfred Hamilton.”

“You have not considered that he might be protecting her from us now by being rid of us completely?”

“Of course I have considered that.”

“He is jealous of what you have become to her, of the influence you –”

“I know.”

James frowned at her, frustrated. “And yet you believe –”

“We will know the truth of it soon enough,” Miranda said. “Our argument cannot change what Peter has already set in motion.”

James’s mouth was a flat line; he looked away from Miranda and around the room again. “There is absolutely nothing here that can be used as a weapon,” he said.

“There is a bucket by the window.”

“A bucket.” He smiled a grim, closed-mouth smile and nodded. “That will make all the difference.”

“You disarmed Colonel Rhett with a chair.”

“He was one man with a defective pistol.” James pushed himself to his feet and started over to where the bucket lay on its side underneath the window. He had barely taken three steps when he went still and tilted his head, like a deer catching a dangerous scent upwind. Miranda heard hooves and the clattering of a carriage, distant at first but growing louder at quite a startling rate.

“Jesus,” James said. He glanced back at Miranda, and right before her eyes she saw the James she knew slipping away and the James the rest of Nassau knew rising to take his place.

She hurried forward to join him, taking his hand in hers and holding onto it tightly when he would have drawn away.

“Miranda, if we must fight –”

“Then fight with me,” she said, placing her other hand on top of his where she held it. “Not for me.”

Those words struck him as deeply as Miranda had hoped they would. For a moment he stood frozen, and then his mask fell away; he looked at her as though she had demanded his very soul and he was willing to surrender it. He nodded and intertwined his fingers with hers. “The bucket?” he murmured as the carriage drew nearer.

“Will it make a difference?”

He shrugged. “It cannot hurt.”

One of their guards – the long-haired one, who seemed to have been given closest custody of them – stuck his head in the door, and any notion James had had of fetching the bucket was quickly set aside.

“They’re coming now,” the guard said. He lingered in the doorway, slouching back against the frame of the door in a most un-military fashion.

Forty-five degrees around from the door as they were, and with this man blocking half of it, Miranda could not see anything outside the building. She tugged on James’s hand a little and they walked back to the bench, where something of the path was still visible. Miranda made to sit down, but James stood firm and shook his head.

“Take cover behind the bench if they come with guns,” James said, so quietly that Miranda could barely hear him. “Do not hesitate.”

“And you?”

James turned his head to look at her, and Miranda met his eyes fiercely. If he had any bright ideas about charging ahead and taking a bullet for her, he would most certainly be thinking again. 

His smile was knowing and fond and quite horribly peaceful. “I will be right beside you,” he said. “I promise.”

Miranda could not stand to see him so calm when she knew what he thought they would be facing. She knew why it was so: he had convinced himself that death was coming for him, and he had come to terms with it. 

She dug her nails into the back of his hand, and he winced. “We are not going to die,” she said, not caring if the guard at the door could hear her. “Don’t you look at me like this is goodbye.”

He lifted his free hand and brushed his fingers across her cheek, light as a feather. “You are – I am so lucky to have known you.”

“Stop it,” she said, batting his hand away from her face and barely resisting the urge to try to slap some sense into him. “Have you not been listening to me at all?”

“Well,” he said, and was interrupted by the man at the door clearing his throat. They turned to look at him, and he stepped outside and away, and a different man came into the doorway.

Thomas was an uncommonly tall man, but he had always been so light in his bearing that it was an easy thing to forget. He stood back from people and sat down with them where he could. He did not loom or lean. He was graceful and slow-moving, not in the least interested in taking advantage of the size and the strength God had given him but choosing instead to act in defiance of it. 

He did not stand lightly any more. He was solid, heavy, his feet planted firmly and his shoulders broader than Miranda remembered. His hair was windswept and his face weatherbeaten; he wore a short beard and a shirt wide open at the collar and seemed perfectly accustomed to doing so. Miranda must have been mistaken; her eyes were playing tricks on her. This man could not possibly be –

Then he looked at her and saw her, and there he was. In a second Miranda was standing before him, rising on the tips of her toes so she could take his face in her hands and kiss him. Every part of her sang; her heart sang; there was no other way to express it than this. 

When she needed to breathe, she finally stepped back and only then became aware of his hands resting comfortably on her waist. He looked down at her with that smile on his face – the open-mouthed smile that spoke of true and unguarded delight – and she kissed him again, his whiskers tickling her face and his lips warm against hers.

“Hullo,” he said softly when they parted for the second time. 

Miranda lowered her heels back down onto the floor and pressed her hands into his chest, feeling the coarse fabric of his shirt under her fingers and the firmness of the muscles underneath. “Thomas,” she said breathlessly. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“I have been asking myself the same question,” he said, still smiling even as his brow wrinkled. Then he looked past her, and both the smile and the frown slid off his face in an instant. Miranda felt his heart pounding under her palm as he stood there wide-eyed and expressionless and utterly mesmerised.

“You should go to him,” Miranda said. “He has had this dream before.”

He looked at her intently, his eyes shining and ever so blue. “I –” he said, and then he looked over her shoulder again and lost his train of thought.

Miranda stepped out of his hands, trailing her own down his chest and then letting them fall away. She stepped out of his way, turning sideways so she too could see what had him so transported.

James was sitting on the bench, white with shock and with his hands clenched into fists on each side of his knees. He looked half a second from fainting dead away; he did not appear to be breathing.

Thomas looked to Miranda one more time, his eyes searching hers for something he surely would not find there. She tugged on his wrist to prompt him into motion, and so he moved, his first few steps stiff and uncertain and his last stumbling and desperate. He fell onto his knees in front of James, and James, who had observed his approach with no change in expression or posture, looked down at him and began to crumble.

They did not need Miranda’s help for this. She forced herself to look away, turning back to the now-empty doorway and trying in vain to settle her fluttering heart and still the shakes that had started to come over her. One breath, then two, then three. She held a hand up in front of her face and observed the tremors in it, clenching her fist tight and then opening it again and, if anything, shaking even harder than before.

She was going to _kill_ Peter.

Miranda glanced over her shoulder and saw James and Thomas both now sitting on the bench and holding onto each other for dear life. Thomas’s eyes were tightly closed; she could see little of James, facing away from her and so completely enveloped in Thomas as he was.

She turned and walked outside, into sunlight and fresh air and a world that she would never be able to look at in quite the same way again. 

The same long-haired man was just outside the door, and he held his musket out in front of Miranda not forcefully but firmly, shaking his head. “No further, please, ma’am.”

This man had been perfectly respectful toward Miranda when she and James had been collected and transported here; if he had any opinions about his assignment or his prisoners, he had kept them very successfully to himself. She wondered if he was new, to be so unlike the others he worked with, or if he had been assigned this role because he was the most capable of disguising his true nature. Five minutes ago, Miranda would have been certain the latter was the true situation. Now she did not know at all what to think.

“I am here to enquire as to what will be happening next,” Miranda said to him, hearing the feebleness of her voice but unable to muster any more strength for it. “We have been told very little about any of this.”

“On my understanding you’re to be taken back to the governor, ma’am, when you’re ready to go.”

“All three of us?”

He nodded.

Miranda glanced along the drive. Two carriages and five men stood in it, and she was just noting the features of the men who must have brought Thomas when the man with his musket still held out in front of her cleared his throat again. 

“Ma’am,” he said. “If you would go back inside, please.”

“Of course,” she said, turning back to him with her friendliest smile. “Thank you.”

He did not smile back, but there was something quite human in his eyes as he nodded. 

So Miranda turned and went back into the house, only to stop in her tracks two steps in. Thomas and James were no longer embracing on the bench, but they sat facing each other still, their knees turned in toward each other with very little distance between them. As she watched, Thomas’s hand moved slowly from the back of James’s neck up to where his hair was tied back. He sat there for a moment with a question in his eyes, and when James gave him a shadow of a nod, he pulled the tie loose. 

Miranda’s own scalp tingled as she watched Thomas pass his hand repeatedly through James’s hair, his fingers spread wide, slowly and steadily freeing it from the form James had so carefully arranged it into that morning. His other hand was held tightly in both of James’s; she wondered if he knew the task that lay ahead of him if he ever wanted free use of that hand again.

Once the job was done, Thomas let his hand fall to James’s shoulder and looked at him with such joy and satisfaction Miranda’s heart grew painful in her chest. She felt she might burst into tears at any moment, and if she did, she would surely never stop. Perhaps she should have fainted dead away, as James had threatened to, and saved herself the trouble of knowing what on earth she was supposed to do now. How was it that she had prepared herself for every contingency but this?

She looked at Thomas and found his eyes on her already, bright and inviting and just a touch concerned. He smiled at her, leaned in to press a slow, soft kiss to James’s brow and then sat back from him a little more, keeping one hand firmly on his shoulder and making no effort to free the other.

It took a moment for James to turn his head toward Miranda as Thomas had done. She very nearly did weep when she saw the dazed look on his face – he was overcome, quite overcome – but instead she hurried forward to sit on his other side, sweeping his hair aside so she could kiss his cheek. 

She had prepared herself for everything but this.

“You were right,” she said, letting his hair fall again. “You were quite right.”

He strained to turn toward her without moving his left shoulder, where Thomas’s hand still rested. “I was –”

“Not to turn your back,” she said. “You were right.”

He tried to pull himself together, sitting a little more upright and gaining a modicum of control over his features, but when he looked to Thomas again it all fled from him, his whole body shaking as his breaths grew rapid and shallow, as he pressed his lips firmly together and his knuckles began to whiten.

Thomas did not hesitate. He moved his hand from James’s shoulder to his neck, kissed that trembling mouth and drew James bodily toward him, somehow extracting his other hand from James’s deathly grip without resistance or complaint. “Shhhhh,” he breathed so quietly Miranda could barely hear him. “Shhhh. I have you, love. I have you.”

Miranda and James had built their love over time and through devastating hardship; James’s trust in her was hard-earned, having been tested and proven time and time again. Over ten long years, he had never given himself over to her like he now did to Thomas. Miranda watched him first lean into Thomas and then slump quite bonelessly against him. She watched Thomas’s arms come up to hold him close, cradling his head against Thomas’s chest. She listened as his shuddering breaths gradually became more even and slowed to match Thomas’s. She had never been a jealous person until James had become her whole world and she had not become his. 

Thomas was looking at Miranda now, uncertainty shining in his eyes. “What is this?” he asked her, nodding to indicate first James, held tightly in his arms, and then seemingly the entire world. “What is –”

“It is far too long a story to be told in this place,” Miranda said. 

“But he is – what is to be –”

“You did not expect us here?”

“No, I expected you,” he said, brushing a hand gently over the top of James’s head. “Only I was not told why or how. I did not –”

James said something that was entirely incomprehensible, having been spoken directly into Thomas’s chest. Thomas’s eyes asked a question of Miranda; she was not entirely sure what it was. She shook her head. 

Thomas frowned and nudged James’s head a little away from him. “I beg your pardon?”

“We went to Nassau,” James said. “When we were sent away, when you were taken, we went to Nassau.”

Thomas’s frown deepened. When James brought life back to his limbs and strength back into his spine, Thomas loosened his arms around him but did not entirely let go. “To Nassau,” he said, looking again to Miranda for his answer. “Why?”

“To see it done,” Miranda told him. “To deny Alfred Hamilton his victory by seeing it done in spite of everything.”

“As pirates,” James said.

Thomas did let go of him then. “You –”

James sat up and squared his shoulders. “I took the name Captain Flint,” he said. “I resolved that Nassau would be made civilised, viable and prosperous, no matter what obstacles stood in its way. If it could not be done by way of pardons issued by the Crown, it would have to be done by changing Nassau itself, from the inside. So we did, and so we have.”

“Dear God,” Thomas said, aghast. “This is what he has done to you?”

“No,” Miranda said firmly. James turned and looked at her, and the silent understanding that passed between them was such a profound relief that Miranda briefly forgot what it was she had been intending to say. “No,” she said again as her head cleared. “This is what we made of all that was left to us.”

“You were to look after –”

“I did,” Miranda said. “He is here, is he not?”

Thomas stared at James, looking both hurt and horrified. James put his hand out on the bench between him and Miranda, and she took hold of it. He did not look at either Thomas or Miranda when he spoke, leaving them both to look at him in profile. “The great men do not know how to give up their pursuit of a better world,” he said softly. “And so they are invincible.”

Miranda had seen Thomas shed the odd tear in pain or frustration, but she had never seen him so near tears of outright misery as he was now. If he was to give way to them, it would be the end of Miranda. She was holding herself together by the skin of her teeth, and so must Thomas. Neither of them, as far as she knew, shared James’s extraordinary ability to claw himself back from the brink.

“I did say, my dear, that it is a story best not told in this place,” she said. 

“Answers must be –” James cut himself off abruptly, glanced at Thomas and then back at Miranda. “Or were you talking to –”

“I was, rather,” Miranda said, very nearly laughing at the disgruntled look on James’s face and the flash of reluctant amusement on Thomas’s. “But go on, if you like.”

James shook his head, looking thoroughly bemused.

“We will discuss it later, then,” Thomas said, attempting to speak decisively but not managing much more than plaintive. When he heard himself, he grimaced and opened his mouth to try again.

“We will be taken back into town once we are ready,” Miranda said, taking pity on him.

“How do you know that?” James asked, frowning.

“The man at the door told me, while you were otherwise engaged.”

Colour came into James’s cheeks, and he glanced sideways at Thomas. “Ah.”

Thomas reached out and ran his hand through James’s hair again, smiling a little. “I cannot begin to express,” he said, and then he seemed to run out of words entirely, looking at his hand tangled in James’s hair as though the rest of his sentence could somehow be discovered there.

After a moment of sitting perfectly still with his eyes closed, James turned to Thomas. “Thomas,” he said. “Where have you been?”

“Ah,” Thomas said, lifting his hand away with some reluctance. “I am – I cannot tell you that.”

“You cannot tell us that,” James said, profoundly unimpressed.

“Why?” Miranda asked. “Why on earth not?”

“It was … a condition of my release, so to speak.”

“You were kept against your will, then,” James said flatly.

“I really cannot –”

“Thomas, if you think that is anywhere near answer enough, you are –”

“This is something else we can discuss later, I think,” Thomas said very quickly. “This is neither the time nor the place.”

“You were kept against your will and sworn to silence upon your release,” James said, paying no regard to Thomas’s words whatsoever. “Now you have been released, so what consequence do you imagine –”

“I made a promise,” Thomas said firmly. He raised his eyebrows at the disdainful hiss of breath that escaped James’s lips. “I intend to keep it.”

“It is certainly something we can discuss later,” Miranda said, her expression intended to make it very clear to Thomas that they would be discussing it, and discussing it at length, and he would not be having his way.

He frowned at her, and it was exactly the same frown she had faced hundreds of times before when she had vexed or frustrated him. _No, my dear, I did not need two full pages of notes on a poem I scribbled down one afternoon and accidentally left out on my desk; I don’t think the Lord and Lady Crowden appreciated being called revolutionaries – if you do not mollify them I will have to, and you know insincerity makes my toes curl; You did not think to consult with me before redesigning the parlour – and the breakfast room – and the music room? Good God, Miranda, I was away for a week._

He stood and welcomed Miranda into his arms when she came to him, one arm around her shoulders and the other holding her head to his chest as he had James’s. There was an effortless strength in the way he held her, not only in his arms but in the firmness of his stance and the steady grip of his hand around the back of her head. Of course James would surrender himself to this; anyone in the world would surrender themselves to this, if they were fortunate enough to be offered it.

When she finally roused herself to pull away, Miranda saw there were tears on Thomas’s face as well as hers. She reached up to touch his cheek as he moved to touch hers, and the perfect harmony of the moment, natural and uncontrived, made her laugh and him smile. She held her hand out for a handkerchief unthinkingly, and Thomas’s hand moved toward a breast pocket that did not exist, stopping dead in the air once he realised the futility of it.

“No matter,” Miranda said a little guiltily, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. “Do put your hand down, dear.”

Instead of doing as she said, Thomas pulled his sleeve down over his hand and dabbed gently at Miranda’s cheek with it. “I have stopped carrying them,” he said, as though that were a thing he ought to apologise for.

“So I see,” Miranda said, standing still as he carefully wiped away her tears. 

Once he was finished, he brushed away his own tears and then lowered his hand. Miranda went on tip-toes to kiss his cheek, which was still a little salty to the taste, and then together they turned to see what might have become of James in all this time they had left him alone.

He was sitting at the far end of the bench, combing his fingers through his hair and attempting to smooth it back down, without very much success. When he saw Miranda and Thomas both looking in his direction, his look of absent concentration grew very quickly radiant, his eyes gleaming and his lips parting in a smile. He caught himself after a moment and put on a highly unconvincing frown, returning his attention to his hair and shaking his head. “No mirror in here,” he said, his ploy as transparent as it was endearing.

“Oh, here,” Miranda said. She held her hand out to Thomas again, this time entirely consciously. He looked at her in a moment of confusion before his expression cleared and he provided her with the tie for James’s hair.

“You never do it right,” James complained as Miranda walked around to the back of the bench. “It never holds.”

“Oh, hush,” she said, standing behind him and nudging his hands out of the way. “It will only need to hold for what is left of the afternoon.”

It was not an easy task with no brush, no comb and no mirror and with James constantly turning his head to sneak glances at Thomas, but by the end Miranda had wrangled all but a few strands of hair into a little tail at the back. She had not positioned the tie quite where James preferred it, and the top of his head was not as smooth as he would like, but Miranda did not particularly care. If James wanted his hair done up exactly, he should not have let it be taken down in the first place. That had certainly not been Miranda’s doing.

She put one palm on either side of James’s head and turned it this way and that under Thomas’s appreciative eye. “How did I do?”

Thomas’s smile was too wide to be believed; he shook his head and did not answer.

Miranda leaned down to speak into James’s ear. “You look very fearsome,” she assured him, and gave him an encouraging pat on the cheek.

“Fearsome,” Thomas echoed, his smile faltering.

“And very beautiful,” Miranda said. “Is it not so?”

“Of course it is.” Thomas’s voice was as warm as the look he directed James’s way, but Miranda knew that the word _fearsome_ had not been banished from his thoughts. Nor should it be. There were any number of truths they were all going to have to face together, with little reason to pretend it was otherwise. She rested her hands lightly on James’s shoulders and waited for Thomas to look at her again. 

It took some time for him to drag his eyes from James’s face and move them to Miranda’s. “I will speak to Peter when we return,” he said with a touch of his old authority in his voice.

“Yes,” Miranda said calmly. “There will be a great many things for us to say.”

“I will speak to him alone.”

James’s shoulders tensed, and Miranda gripped them a little tighter. “Alone,” she said.

Thomas nodded. “Alone.”

James shifted under Miranda’s hands. “Why?” he asked roughly.

Thomas looked at him and said nothing.

“Right,” James said. “You made a promise.” He took one of Miranda’s hands in his so he could hold it as he stood up, only letting go when he was on his feet looking at both of them. “We might as well go, then. We can fill you in on the way.”

“Fill me in on what?”

Miranda came around the bench to stand beside James. “If you are going to speak to Peter on your own, there are things you must know beforehand,” she said to Thomas. “The circumstances in which we have met are complex and far from comfortable.”

“I thought you must have been searching for me,” he said slowly, looking from Miranda to James and then back again. “Did Peter not assist you?”

Miranda exchanged a long look with James. Thomas watched them impatiently, a frown growing on his face.

“No,” James said. “We were not searching for you.”

Thomas’s lips parted in confusion. “Then how –”

“We had best sit down again,” Miranda said. “I think this is a conversation best not had on the road.”

Thomas stayed where he was. “Tell me,” he said with steel in his voice. “Tell me what has happened.”

Miranda arranged her skirts and sat down at the end of the bench, clasping her hands together in her lap. James walked to the middle and joined her, leaving a perfectly Thomas-sized gap between them.

“Do you remember Peter and Marion’s daughter?” Miranda asked Thomas. 

“Yes,” Thomas said. “Yes, I think so.”

“Her name was Abigail.”

Thomas walked over and took his place between Miranda and James, his brow knit in puzzlement. “Yes, little Abigail Ashe. I remember.”

“She is not so little any more.”

“No,” he said. “I imagine not.”

“You have heard of Charles Vane?” James asked.

Thomas turned to look at James. “Charles Vane? I do not think – no, I do not think so. Who is he?”

“I cannot tell you the whole story, not in the time we have,” James said. “But I will tell you what you need to know in order to face Peter on even footing.”

“Any questions you have, we will answer,” Miranda said. “But not at this very moment. There is not the time.”

Thomas’s mouth was pinched and dissatisfaction was written all over his face, but he nodded. “Go on,” he said. “Tell me.”


	9. Chapter 9

Thomas requested and was granted an audience with Peter immediately upon arriving at the house, leaving Miranda and James with nothing to do but walk slowly upstairs – unaccompanied, for the very first time – and return to the room that Miranda now realised she had come to think of as theirs. Twelve nights they had spent there, twelve mornings and a good half-dozen afternoons, and everywhere Miranda looked she saw reminders of those twelve days and the routines they had settled into over the course of them. 

When he came upstairs Thomas would not, as they had, walk into a room that was lifeless and bare. There would be signs of habitation everywhere he looked. He would see the chairs that Miranda had moved from the far corner of the room to sit by the window instead, where towels and clothing could be draped across them in a position that would give them sun and air. He would see the heavy basin at the foot of the bed that Miranda had used to wash the blood from her body and her clothes. He would see five books piled up on the dresser, next to the near-empty jar of salve and the fresh flowers that Miss Martin had brought in yesterday afternoon. He would see the dust that James’s boots had just tracked into the room and the leather coat that he would very soon hang by the door. He would see two hairbrushes on the dressing table alongside the two rings that James had taken off on the third day and not put back on since.

“Tell me it was real,” James said, standing just inside the door and looking slowly around the room. “Tell me he will be coming up here.”

“It is real,” Miranda said. “You know that it is.” She walked across to the dresser so she could properly appreciate the flowers there: a handful of yellow daffodils, neatly but not elegantly arranged. “Go on and take off your coat; you must be sweltering.”

After a moment she heard him do so, and she heard the thud of his boots as he walked across the rug to sit on the bed. Her awareness of him faded when she cast her eyes over the books Peter had provided them: La Vida es Sueño, a play that she and Thomas had loved to read aloud together; The Improvement of Human Reason, an old favourite of Thomas’s translated for the first time into English; Essais de Théodicée, a recent book of philosophy in one of Thomas’s great areas of interest; and A Cruising Voyage Round the World – that choice Miranda still could not explain, even now she was in a position of much greater understanding. Perhaps Thomas would be able to shed some light on the matter when he came up to join them.

Knowing them both as she did and taking into account the extraordinary nature of the meeting between them, Miranda thought it likely that Thomas would be quite some time downstairs with Peter. The prospect of a long wait was likely driving James to distraction, but Miranda was glad of it. There was one matter she wanted to have said and done between her and James well before Thomas arrived. She went and sat down by James on the side of the bed, reaching out to take his hand just as he lifted his to do the same. 

“I cannot believe it,” he said as they clasped their hands together. “I cannot believe this is –” He turned his head to look at her, and his words trailed away. “What is it?”

Miranda would not allow the concern he directed her way to weaken her resolve. She steeled herself to say what she must, even when the intensity of his gaze began to burn her. “We both thought him dead,” she said. “We carried on our lives accordingly. I know he has always had your heart; it was torn from you when he was torn from us.”

“Miranda –”

“Now he is here to hold it once more, I have no quarrel with you giving it to him. I have no quarrel with you giving it to him wholly and completely.”

She looked into his eyes, and she did not know what she saw there. She did not know what he saw in hers. The room was silent but for the thundering of Miranda’s heart in her chest. 

After what seemed an eternity, James looked away. His eyes searched the room as he prepared his answer, then returned to her once he had it. “You said to me ten years ago that love cannot be forced, and it should not be denied where it is felt,” he said. “You were releasing me from any obligation I might feel toward you that would prevent me finding my way with Thomas. You were generous then, as you are generous now. But I have no wish to be released.”

Miranda did not like to doubt James, but he did not always know himself as well as he thought he did. He had always hated to disappoint her. “James –”

“We have never pretended to be something we are not.”

Miranda raised her eyebrows. “We have never –”

“To each other,” he clarified quickly, a brief flash of humour showing in his eyes before he became serious again. “We have never been bound by others’ ideas of what a man and a woman must be together. We have never tried to be less or more than we are. I would like to continue in that way, if that is something you would want. You know Thomas has never minded what we might or might not do in each other’s company.”

Miranda certainly did know that – he had made it abundantly clear to her on more than one occasion – but it was not Thomas’s wishes she was presently concerned with.

“I did not become involved with you because of anything I felt for Thomas,” James said. “I found him later, and differently.”

“Let’s not dance around this,” Miranda said. “You liked me, and you loved him.”

James grimaced. “Yes. But that is not –” He bit down on his next words and hesitated for a long moment before speaking again. “He is –”

“I understand that we must live according to our natures,” Miranda said. “I think by now I know something about yours.”

“I do love you now,” James said with a touch of desperation. “I am not – I am not _pretending_ to –”

“I know that,” Miranda said, and he fell still. “I understand the nature of it.”

“I am not sure that I do,” James said after a moment. “With Thomas, I understand it perfectly. Ever since he first – as soon as I felt it, I knew. It was –” He let out a shaky breath and closed his eyes. “He was very careful. He allowed for the possibility I would want less than he did. He allowed for the possibility I would want him but not – but choose to deny myself.” James shook his head and opened his eyes, looking vaguely out ahead of him. “There was no need for him to take such care. I was his from the moment I knew that I could be. It is something beyond choice, I think. If I could have chosen to stop feeling it, all these years –”

“James,” Miranda said. She waited for him to look at her. “You do not have to justify any of this to me.”

“No, but I have to – there is –” He stopped again and frowned, gathering his thoughts. “I have been accused of quite deranged thinking in my time. I have chased outcomes so wildly implausible that others could not even imagine them, let alone believe in them. I have pondered permutation after permutation, weighed and measured each and every possibility and followed a thousand different paths into a thousand different futures. I cannot begin to imagine my life without you in it.”

“James –”

“I cannot properly explain it, not when I barely understand it myself. It might not be the same as – it is not the same, but you are in the very deepest parts of me. You are essential. I will always want you close to me. I want always to be close to you. I don’t want to ask that of you and then not – if you do not want it, that is one thing. If you are uncomfortable –”

“I do not know how to share you.”

James considered that for a long moment. “You do not –”

“It is one thing to step back graciously from an affair when one is happily married, impossibly wealthy and far from lacking in alternative pastimes,” Miranda said. “I have had you now for ten years, and you are all that I have had for ten years. I cannot take the half-step back that I did then. I do not have that sort of grace in me any more.”

“I was a pastime, was I?” James said, his tone of mock affront very nearly concealing the trace of hurt in his voice.

“I liked you very much,” Miranda assured him, “but you are far from the only man I have ever liked.”

“Well, I know that,” he said. “I had heard – I did not get the impression that I was the first man you had fucked in a carriage.”

“And so you were not,” Miranda agreed. 

“But a pastime?”

“You have quite ignored the rest of what I said.”

“I have never been called a pastime before.”

“You have been called far worse than that.”

“Yes, but –”

“I do not love easily, James.”

He blinked at her.

“I have loved three men in all my life,” Miranda told him. “My father, my husband and you. I never did have love affairs in London; I found very pleasurable ways to pass my time.”

“You did not love any of the –”

“Only you,” she said, “and only some time after our affair had already come to its end.”

His mouth twisted in dismay. “You did not tell me this before. You have never –”

“Would you have cared to hear it?”

James’s shoulders slumped. The apology in his eyes was almost too much for Miranda to bear. “I have taken you very much for granted.”

“You have, yes.”

He sighed long and deep. “I am sorry for it. I truly am sorry.”

Miranda nodded. The smile she attempted was not much of one, but then neither was his. _Aren’t we a pair_ , she thought. 

“You say you do not know how to share me,” James said, self-conscious and more than a little bewildered. “I haven’t the faintest idea how to be shared, if such a thing can –”

“Peter has excused himself from dinner,” Thomas announced, belatedly knocking on the open door after he had come through. “We are to go down in ten minutes.”

“Excused himself?” James said, far too startled by the news to be properly thrilled by Thomas’s reappearance. “Why?”

“He was of the opinion that his presence would be unwelcome,” Thomas said, his eyes passing over the room without resting for more than a second on either Miranda or James. 

Miranda recognised this mood of his, the frantic energy that came over him when he was panicked, when he was frustrated, when he felt helpless. “Why would he think that?” she asked as Thomas caught sight of the books on the dresser and walked directly to them in long, swift strides.

“I really couldn’t say,” he said, spreading the five volumes out before him. “Oh, someone’s finally translated Ibn Tufail. It really is about time. And this is – A Cruising Voyage Around – are these yours?”

“Peter’s,” James said, exchanging a wary glance with Miranda.

Thomas picked the books up one by one, tracing his fingers over the covers and flicking through the pages, deeply inhaling their scent before putting each back down. He cupped the jar of salve in both hands and ran his thumbs along the smooth glass before taking off the lid, wrinkling his nose in distaste and immediately closing it again. “What is _that_?” he asked, setting it atop the dresser again and pushing it as far back as it could go.

“Elder, predominantly,” Miranda said. 

“It smells like –”

“Like piss,” James agreed. “Will you come and sit down, Thomas?”

“In a moment.” Thomas walked toward the window, trailing a hand along the wall as he went. When he reached the curtain he took a moment to investigate its texture before peering around it to look out the window, still holding onto the fabric between thumb and forefinger as he did.

James stood and went to him. He eased the curtain out of Thomas’s grip and took firm hold of that hand, standing calmly at Thomas’s side while Thomas took in the view. It was not long before Thomas bowed his head and turned to James, drawing their joined hands up to his breast and setting his other hand flat against James’s heart. The tension seeped very slowly out of him, and out of Miranda too, where she sat on the bed and watched them.

“All right?” James asked after a quiet minute.

“Yes,” Thomas said, as though he thought the question rather foolish. He still held James’s hand firmly to him. “I am quite all right.”

“There are other clothes, if you would like to change before dinner,” James said evenly. “Some of the shirts they gave me might fit you.”

“No,” Thomas said defiantly. “What I am wearing will do very well.”

James cast a dubious look at Thomas’s ensemble, which was plain and worn and more or less matched the colour of the curtains from top to toe, but said nothing about it. Then Thomas took his turn to look James up and down, a smile tugging at his lips as he did so. He lifted his hand from James’s heart and touched the little golden earring in his left ear, pulling gently and then rubbing circles around it with the tip of his finger.

“Perhaps I should get one of these,” he mused. He glanced at Miranda, inviting her to share in the joke. “I should hate to be the odd man out among us.”

“Would that I could grow a beard,” Miranda replied in a tone of great wistfulness, and Thomas snorted _–_ lightly, quietly, but a snort all the same. By the look on James’s face, it was as much a new experience for him as it was for Miranda. By the look on his face, he liked it as much as she did.

“I would offer to shave in solidarity,” Thomas said, “but I’ve rather come to like wearing a beard.”

“It looks very well on you, darling.”

“Thank you, dear.” 

Thomas turned from Miranda to James and raised his eyebrows expectantly.

“Something you wanted?” James asked, mirroring Thomas’s expression quite perfectly and offering no comment of his own.

“A great many things,” Thomas said with sudden seriousness, cutting through the humour in the room and leaving it deathly still. “I scarcely know where to begin.”

It did not take long for James’s concerned expression to turn into one of intense longing; Thomas bit down gently on his lower lip, staring fixedly at James.

“With dinner, I suppose,” James said, forcing the words out with great effort. Thomas blinked and looked away from him. “You said ten minutes?”

Thomas nodded, then cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose we are due.”

Miranda stood up, and they both turned toward her. “You have been on the road a long while,” she said as she came to join them. “I imagine you have not been eating particularly well.”

Thomas gave her a wry look. “How long I have been on the road is not –”

“Dinner, then,” James said, evidently resigned to the necessity of it. “We might as well get on with it. You’re sure you don’t wish to change into –”

“I am quite certain,” Thomas said. “I have not had a great deal of success with your clothes in the past.”

“They are not my clothes,” James said with some distaste. “Do you really think I would –”

“Dinner?” Miranda cut in, before he could fully warm to his topic.

“Yes, of course,” Thomas said, but he did not move.

James sighed. “If we are going, then we might as well go.” He walked over to the door and held it open. Thomas offered Miranda his arm, and they walked out of the room together. The instant James had closed the door behind them, Miranda drew him in to her other side. 

“Miranda,” he said, his voice just as tense as the arm Miranda held in hers, “I don’t think –”

“It is best you don’t, yes,” she said, setting off for the stairs. “Come along.”

* * *

It was not only the texture of the walls and the smell of books that called out for Thomas’s undivided attention. At dinner he ate slowly and with great precision, sometimes so caught up in contemplation of his meal that he seemed to lose track of all that was being said around him. James clearly was concerned by it, and so was Miranda, but for the time being they left him be, carrying on the conversation between them when Thomas dropped out of it and including him without comment when he returned. 

To begin with, they spoke of the house on New Providence Island and the things that would need to be attended to should they ever return there. Thomas contributed little on that topic, though he did appear to be listening more often than he was not. When the conversation turned to Peter’s house and his staff, Thomas briefly sought to clarify the layout of the house and hear the names of all those he was likely to encounter. Miranda kept the majority of her opinions regarding Peter’s staff to herself; they had been left alone in the room, but she would be shocked if there were not at least one guard posted at each door, listening far more closely than Thomas was inclined to.

As soon as Abigail’s name was mentioned Thomas came alive, making up the earlier deficit of his attention with an eager interest in everything that might be said about her. The role she had played in the events of the last month had already been outlined to him, but now he set down his knife and fork and took great delight in every opinion of hers that Miranda relayed to him on music, literature, embroidery, floral arrangement and matters of philosophy and religion, lamenting the fact that he had not yet had a chance to meet her and declaring his intention to seek the introduction as soon as may be. Miranda so enjoyed both the topic of conversation and Thomas’s enthusiasm for it that she was quite oblivious to how quiet and restless James was growing until Thomas drew it to her attention with a sudden quiet comment about the fading light in the room.

James had not been enthusiastic about coming down for dinner in the first place, and now they had kept him here for what must be nearly an hour and a half. Miranda considered how forbearing he had been and all that he must be aching to do.

Fortunately, in this instance Miranda could provide him with his heart’s desire and satisfy her own by means of one single request. No barrier was erected to prevent Miranda visiting Abigail directly after dinner, leaving James and Thomas to go upstairs by themselves. Indeed, after a few messages run back and forth, Miranda was permitted to enter Abigail’s own room for the first time, sitting with Abigail on one side of the room while Mrs Griffiths quietly read on the other. 

The joy Abigail expressed on Miranda’s behalf soon brought them both to tears; Mrs Griffiths turned herself away so that they might weep for a time in each other’s arms. When all their tears were exhausted Abigail offered Miranda a handkerchief. She gladly took it and wiped her eyes; when Abigail refused to take it back from her, she tucked it neatly into her sleeve. Perhaps she would be able to turn the tables on Thomas, if he were to weep in her presence again.

They sat quietly after that, speaking only the occasional thought aloud to each other. Nothing of any significance was said, and Miranda’s heart had a chance to find peace for a while with this remarkable girl who had come to mean so much to Miranda in such a short time, who had heard the terrible secrets of Miranda’s life and not faltered for a moment in her regard for her. There were very few people with whom Miranda was comfortable in silence; she basked in it now with Abigail and was barely even perturbed by the presence of Mrs Griffiths, so familiar had it become to her.

She stayed in that room for as long as she could, rising to excuse herself only when Abigail stifled three yawns in as many minutes, blinking at Miranda through bleary eyes. She protested that she was not tired and would like to sit up a while longer, but Mrs Griffiths was already rising to wish Miranda a good night and usher her politely but firmly out of the room. 

After taking her leave from Abigail’s room, Miranda made her way slowly to the staircase and walked even more slowly up it, revelling in the opportunity to do so without escort and wishing to give James and Thomas as much time alone as she could. When she reached their door she stopped a moment to listen; upon hearing nothing but silence, she knocked quietly and let herself in.

Thomas was sitting in the window, leaning forward with his head in his hands. He glanced up when Miranda came in but did not otherwise alter his position. James was in bed fast asleep, lying on his side facing away from the window with no shirt on, his hair out and the covers not coming up much past his waist. His chest rose and fell with peaceful regularity. 

Miranda took a moment to observe him and then went to sit by Thomas’s side. He straightened as she came to him and they sat shoulder to shoulder, as they had done so many times before. She brushed her hand through his hair and then down his cheek, scratching a little at his beard. He smiled sideways at her, and it was the easiest thing in the world to smile back at him.

“I did not think I would come up here and find him asleep,” she said, keeping her voice low though she doubted anything short of a cannon blast would pull James from his slumber.

“He has not been sleeping,” Thomas said. “Half his face is shadow.”

“Yes,” Miranda said. “I have had great difficulty with him while we have been here.”

Thomas’s expression was pained as he contemplated James. “For twelve days, you said.”

“I must say, I rather thought the problem might persist.”

He forced his eyes away from James to look back at Miranda. “You thought he still would not sleep?”

“For fear of waking.”

“Ah,” Thomas said, his eyes returning to James. “ _He has had this dream before_.”

“But you have proved me wrong, as you so love to do,” Miranda said, and that brought a weary smile to Thomas’s face. “However did you manage it?”

“I spoke sensibly to him,” Thomas said, “and he saw reason.”

“Oh, indeed?”

“Indeed.”

Miranda took a good look at James, who lay on a slight diagonal across the bed, leaning forwards towards its middle, one hand tucked under his chest and the other lying flat on the mattress in front of him. His hair was loose, but it had been tucked back very neatly away from his face.

That was decidedly not how James lay in a bed when he was in it alone.

“Why, Thomas,” Miranda said, “I believe you have used wiles on –” She caught herself before saying _the lieutenant_ , wondering at how easily the byname had come to her lips after not having used it for a decade. Last she had seen Thomas – no, not last she had seen him but the time before that, James had indeed still been _the lieutenant_. For the next ten years he had been _the captain_ and had so thoroughly inhabited the role of Captain Flint that Eleanor Guthrie, with whom he had worked closely for years, had not recognised his first name when Miranda had called him by it. Now that James’s men had deserted – or mutinied, if the distinction mattered – he was not even a captain, just as Thomas was no lord and Miranda no lady and no widow. They were all just – “On him,” she finished weakly, feeling a headache begin to come on.

“It did not take much,” Thomas said. “He is –” He rubbed a hand over his face for a good five seconds. When he stopped, his expression was bleak. “I cannot fathom the life the two of you have led. I never dreamed he would – and yet he has not changed.”

Miranda blinked at him, astonished. 

“Captain Flint,” Thomas said, as halting and ineloquent as Miranda had ever heard him. He gestured at James, a flourish of the hand that communicated only that Thomas did not know what it was that he wanted to say. “And yet.”

There were a great many things Miranda could say to Thomas about Captain Flint – things she wanted very much to tell him and things she prayed he would never have to know – but the man himself was unconscious in the bed and Miranda would not take the telling of it from him, whose story it was to tell. “I am sure we have all changed,” she said instead, taking Thomas’s hand and openly feeling the strength of it, her fingers seeking out the evidence of physical labour that she had always known on James’s hands but never before on Thomas’s. There were not only callouses but scars, and she found a slight twist to one finger that had not been there before. Thomas had promised never to reveal where he had been kept these past ten years. Miranda and James would have it out of him before long.

“ _The universe is change_ ,” Thomas mused. “ _Life is judgement_.”

Now there was a book that Peter might have utterly destroyed them with. He must have known they could not have survived it.

Thomas looked at Miranda with eyes that were tired, and loving, and sad. “It cannot be as it was,” he said. “I am not the same.”

“I know.”

The expression on Thomas’s face when he looked back to James took a moment for Miranda to place; she had never seen it on him before. It was a still, quiet, terrible fear. “I am not as I was.”

“I do not want to speak for him,” Miranda said, “but I will tell you what I think, if you would like to hear it.”

“Of course I want to know what you think,” Thomas murmured. “I – well, I nearly always want to know what you think.”

“I think if you were still exactly the same as you were ten years ago, James would think himself –” Miranda stopped herself. James should and would speak on his own behalf when it came to matters between him and Thomas. She could not say nothing at all, but it was equally important that she did not say too much. “I can only tell you that when he dreams of you, he does not dream of your wealth, or your status, or your youth, or anything else you consider you might have lost. It is your love he has longed for, and he will take it in whatever form it is offered.”

“I find myself in no short supply of that,” Thomas said. “It is just that –” He drew in a deep, shaking breath and let it out again. “I do not know how to feel this. I have forgotten what it is to feel any of this.”

“You may be out of practice in it,” Miranda allowed. “But if you were to go and rejoin him on that bed right this moment, I think that you would very soon remember.”

That brought a sweet little smile to Thomas’s lips, but even so, he shook his head. “I cannot have him in my arms forever, much as I would like to. There are other –”

“None of us knows how to do this, Thomas. He does not know. I do not know. You do not need to take any more responsibility for it than we do.”

Thomas’s shoulders slumped a little, and his eyes rested wistfully on James’s sleeping form. “You have taken responsibility for him.”

“I have tried.”

He frowned at that, turning back to her. “You have seen him through these last ten years.”

“He has gone his own way,” Miranda said. “I have done what I can, but he is not a man easily taken in hand.”

Thomas likely had a great many memories that ran contrary to that statement, but he held his silence. 

“He has been grievously hurt,” Miranda said. “None of us is as we were.”

Thomas sat in thought for a long while. Miranda sat beside him, thinking of little but the miracle that was his presence – in truth, his very existence. She leaned into his arm, rested her head on his shoulder and relished the simple warmth of him, his stillness and his slow, calm breathing. Her head ached a little, and her eyes were sore from the tears she had shed, but she would not change anything about his moment for the world.

She was dozing when Thomas spoke, his voice soft in her ear. “You look like you could do with some sleep as well, dear,” he said.

Miranda sat up and looked dimly at the bed, a thought very slowly occurring to her. She had not even considered the issue of –

“You and I have shared a bed,” Thomas said, reading her mind with a yawn in his voice. “You and he have shared a bed. He and I have shared a bed.”

Miranda was not sure of the exact source of her hesitation. Thomas’s words were quite true, and there was nothing in the way of propriety or embarrassment to prevent them all sleeping together. Peter had seemingly assumed that they would, though that was likely born of an unwillingness to raise the matter with them at all rather than any implicit acceptance or understanding on his part, just as he had put Miranda and James into the same room and the same bed without a word being spoken about it.

“Miranda?”

The problem, she considered, was with the way Thomas had said it, as though any one of those three things was equivalent to the other two. On their wedding night, Miranda and Thomas had slept in their clothes, sitting up against the pillows; she could count on the fingers of one hand the nights they had spent together from then on. James had shared Miranda’s bed and nobody else’s for the last ten years of their lives. “It is different,” she said. “You know that it is different.”

Thomas nodded his acceptance of that but then gave her a wry look. “You would have me sleep on the floor, then?”

“No,” Miranda said quickly. “Good God, Thomas, of course not.”

“Are you offering to sleep there yourself?”

“No,” she said again, trying not to shudder at the thought.

“Are you volunteering to wake James and remove him from the bed so that the two of us might share it?”

Miranda hissed between her teeth. With Thomas there was always that touch of laughter, always genuine good humour and good will underlying the most exasperating forms of argument known to man. It was near impossible to resent him for it, and thatwas what Miranda resented most of all. “No,” she said. “I –”

“I know it is not as simple as I have made it out,” Thomas said, a great deal more seriously. “I mean nothing by it but the practical.”

Miranda looked at James. She could see in her mind’s eye exactly where Thomas had been: lying face to face with him, brushing the hair off James’s face, settling his arm over his body and pressing their brows carefully together where they lay. She had never seen them together in that way, but it was oh so easy to read when she had lain beside James just the same, when that empty space in front of him was calling out for her to fill it.

“Do you want to wake him?” Thomas asked. “If you wish to discuss it before –”

Miranda just looked at him, and he stopped talking. She had no words to express anything she felt; all she could do was look. 

“I will sit up a while longer,” Thomas said, swallowing and turning his face away from her. “I am not quite ready for bed.”

He lied just as he had used to: very, very poorly. “Thomas, I –”

“You have been with him for ten years,” Thomas said wearily. “I know.”

“He fell asleep in your arms,” Miranda said. “He ought to wake up the same.”

“This is absurd,” Thomas said. “There is no –”

“Do you have a coin that we could toss?”

Thomas looked at her blankly and then shook his head. “I do not have a coin, and even if –”

“Then I do not know –”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Thomas said. “Come with me.”

Miranda followed Thomas to the bed. He knelt on it carefully, took James’s left shoulder in one hand and pulled him around so he lay flat on his back. James roused slightly, pushing up against Thomas’s hand with a vague, sleepy noise, but Thomas held steady, stroking James’s cheek with his other hand and murmuring in his ear until he fell still again. 

Thomas looked over his shoulder at Miranda wearing a smile of triumphant, foolish pride, and Miranda wondered at the sudden capacity for love she had inside her and how easily it could flow from her to Abigail, to James, to Thomas. It had been such a long time since Miranda had had more than one person to love, and she had forgotten how much easier that made the expression of it. Her jealousy, her uncertainty and whatever else might come to stand in their way were matters for another day. Now she smiled at Thomas, who was wriggling down under the covers on James’s left side, his own shirt tossed vaguely toward the foot of the bed. 

“I’ll put out the candles, shall I?” she said, looking pointedly around the room.

“Oh,” Thomas said. “Oh, I didn’t think – yes, dear. Sorry. Oh, and your – would you like help with –”

“Hush,” Miranda said, slipping her dress down over her shoulders. “You will wake him.”

Thomas was quiet while Miranda changed into her bedclothes and then walked around the room to extinguish the candles. She knew the room well enough by now that she had no difficulty finding her way to her side of the bed and climbing in to lie beside James, kissing his bare shoulder and hugging his arm to her chest. 

After a long, quiet moment, she let go of James’s arm and smoothed her hand across his chest instead; she could not have been less surprised to find Thomas’s hand already resting there. This was like nothing they had ever done before, but Thomas did not hesitate before turning his hand, and Miranda did not hesitate to take hold of it. James slept on between them, his chest rising and falling beneath their joined hands and his breath whistling ever so slightly through his nose.

“Good night, Thomas,” Miranda said.

“Good night, my dear,” Thomas said, his voice thick with sleep. “I will see you in the morning.”

Miranda smiled and hummed her agreement. She would wake up in the morning with Thomas and with James, and they would face the world together. How such a thing was possible she still did not know. Right now, in this moment, she did not care. All that mattered was that it was true.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everybody who's read, given kudos and/or left comments on this fic. It's been wonderful to write and wonderful to share with you all <3


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